(O)maha

[Michael McCafferty]

Quoting Koontz John E <John.Koontz at colorado.edu>:

> On Mon, 22 Mar 2004, R. Rankin wrote:
> > He acquired the tribal name for his map while exploring the Mississippi.
> > There's no telling how many tribes the name might have filtered through
> before
> > getting to the Illinois Algonquians.
>
> True, but the simplest assumption is that it filtered along the Missouri
> and up and down the Mississippi, or across Iowa-Minnesota-Wisconsin to the
> Mississippi and Great Lakes to the places where he might most logically
> have encountered it.  We have a general idea what the list of languages
> would have been, in these cases, and we know his main contact languages,
> too.  Of course, there are some anomalies like the mysterious Michigamea
> language to warn us that we don't have all the cards from the original
> deck.
>
>

True, but it's also clear that the Marquette generation knew next to nothing
about the Michigamea, who, rather than flee to Wisconsin or southeast
Missouri, went down the Mississippi, as you know, when the Seneca and their
buddies pushed their catastrophe to the west. The Illinois-French dictionary
says that the Kaw knew the Michigamea by the name <8arakia>, which, as Bob
pointed out a few years ago, is not analyzable in Siouan. However, this
spelling is a dead-ringer for Old Illinois /waarahkia/ 'cave country person'.
I've suggested in a piece of writing yet to be published that the term may
apply to the lower Ohio.

Michael







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