'eight' some more

[R. Rankin]

Since I was the author of the original paper on the Illinois borrowing of Ohio
Valley Siouan 'eight', I suppose I should weigh in on this thread.  In addition
to the paper in IJAL, there is a little more information that bears on the
question.



Virginia Siouan.  Maj. General Abraham Wood wrote to John Richards in 1674, "Now
ye king must goe to give ye monetons a visit which were his friends, mony
signifiying water and ton great in theire language.  Ye monyton towne situated
upon a very great river att which place ye tide ebbs and flowes...."  (Alvord
and Bidgood, 1912, 221)  Although there is no further reference to this tribe,
it seems clear that they were Siouan, since maNiN' ~ moNniN' is Tutelo, and
indeed common Siouan, for 'water' while itâ is 'great, big', with an equally
good Siouan pedigree.  Apparently the trip to the Monytons involved going West
over the mountains.  The river they lived on is identified as the Kanawha, in
WV.



Both the Saponi and Occaneechee (also Akenatzy and other spelling variants) are
mentioned several accounts from the 1670's.  According to John Lederer (1670),
Thomas Batts and Robert Fallam (1671) and James Needham and Gabriel Arthur
(1673), the Saponies lived in the western part of Virginia in the foothills of
the Blue Ridge Mountains.  The Tutelos were some distance further to the west,
and the Occaneechee to the southwest.  Between 1673 and 1700 both tribes had
joined the Occaneechees.  Their later movements are of no consequence to us
here.



Other Ohio Valley Siouan.  The Biloxis are not attested for certain before their
1699 location near Pascagoula.  There is one reference to what was possibly
Biloxi up in central Alabama at an earlier time.



The Ofo were supposedly located on the Ohio River under their alias, the
Mosopelea.  They were traced down the Ohio and then the Mississippi by Swanton's
research.  They took refuge among the Taensa and later both groups, along with
the Koroa, joined the Tunica, where Swanton visited them in 1907.  The name
Mosopelea gives rise to two separate terms for the Ofo.  Bearing in mind the
attested sound change by which Ofo and Biloxi lost all lexeme-initial labial
sonorants, /m/ and /w/ and the change by which Common Siouan *s > /f/ in Ofo, we
can derive the following names:



moso (pelea)

   oso

   ofo



... the name by which they were known by Muskogean-speaking tribes who
folk-etymologized it as /ofi/ 'dog' in Choctaw/Chickasaw.  Also ...



mosope (lea)

   ouspe             (and several more of Swanton's spelling variants)

   us pe

   ushpe



... which is the term by which the Tunica called them during Swanton's visit.



Both terms, given known sound changes, tend to confirm Swanton's identification
with the Mosopelea of the upper Ohio Valley in proto-historic times.



So we pretty clearly have Virginia Siouan tribes on the Kanawha R. and very
likely on the Ohio R. in the 17th century.



Chiwere (Ioway), on the other hand, lacks not only the putative source-word for
'eight'; it also lacks any trace of the companion term for 'seven'.  So even if
we accept the idea that "might have been" cognates can be accepted into
evidence, the "might have been" use of a prefix *pha:- or *phe:- used to form
numbers 7 and 8 of the second quine is also totally lacking.  Nor do we find any
trace of it in Winnebago.



So I stand by my Ohio Valley Siouan/Illinois Algonquian contact story.



(All the above is part of a paper I did at AAA in 1980.  It's too long to
recapitulate here and was precomputer, so all I have is a typescript.)



Bob



----- Original Message -----
> On Wed, 28 Apr 2004, David Costa wrote:

> It's really only one form in Tutelo (or whatever).  The multiplicy of
> forms is in the ears of the beholder and in MI.

> > > As I recall, Bob Rankin opted for Tutelo over Ofo partly because
> > > he thought Tutelo l more like MI r or n than Ofo t (which might have been
> > > rather d-like).

I think there are several attested Tutelo variants just as there are several in
MI.          Bob