'eight' some more

[Michael McCafferty]

Quoting "R. Rankin" <rankin at ku.edu>:
>
> Virginia Siouan.  Maj. General Abraham Wood wrote to John Richards in 1674,
> "Now
> ye king must goe to give ye monetons
> (Alvord
> and Bidgood, 1912, 221)
> 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.
>
>
>
>> 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.


This is curious, but I find this analysis far-fetched. Plus, what is that
-lea, and what happened to it?


>
>
>
> 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.

I don't doubt this.
>
>
>>
>
> 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
>


I found the identification of "Moneton" very interesting and using The
linguistic analysis of "Mosopelea" does not hold water. One of the problems is
that Bob based his  analysis on a La Sallian form of the ethnonym "Mosopelea"
(La Salle was a hopeless monolingual) and failed to go back to the original
recording/spelling of the name.

Before looking at what "Mosopelea" is, let's look at what it is (also) not:
Erminie Wheeler-Voegelin’s explanation that <Mosopelea> represents Shawnee
/m?$- ‘big’ plus /peleewa/‘turkey’ is either whimsical or forced. Such an
analysis simply does not stand up to either historical or philological
scrutiny. In her eagerness to designate the term Shawnee, the historian failed
to realize that the demonym <Mosopelea> first came from the plume of Jacques
Marquette in 1673--and this is critical to the analysis of the term- and it
appeared subsequently on the maps describing the Mississippi voyage that were
based on Jolliet’s intelligence—and there is no evidence that either Marquette
or Jolliet ever met a Shawnee Indian. If they did, neither would have been
able to communicate with himher since Marquette and Jolliet could not speak
Shawnee. Even though Shawnee is an Algonquian language, it is profoundly
different from and mutually unintelligible with the six Algonquian languages
that Marquette knew. Now, Marquette’s early relation of 1669-70, written from
the Mission du Saint-Esprit at Chaquamegon on the south shore of Lake
Superior, does speak of a visit that the Illinois had received earlier in
their own country from some Shawnee. In fact, the Illinois boy from whom
Marquette learned the Illinois language had witnessed that very visit.
However, Marquette did not meet any Shawnee in his lifetime and Jolliet
himself would have obtained information about the Mosopelea from the Illinois,
not from the Shawnee. Of course, these facts do not imply that the people
known as the Mosopelea were not Shawnee speakers; they simply show that the
historically recorded etymon <Mosopeleacipi> did not come from the Shawnee
language.
          Given the earliest recording of this ethnonym, which is <MONS8PELEA>
(not "Mosopelea") from Marquette’s map of the Mississippi; given the year the
name was coined, 1673, a time well before any contact between Frenchmen and
Shawnee had occurred—or indeed could occur; given the fact that the only
Mississippi valley language Marquette spoke was Miami-Illinois; and above all,
given the internal linguistic evidence provided by the word itself, presented
below, <Mosopelea> is no doubt a Miami-Illinois ethnonym.
          Linguistically speaking, Marquette’s <MONS8PELEA> consists of two
elements. The first is Old Illinois /mooswa/‘deer’, phonetic [moonswa]~
[moonzwa]. This term not only appears in Marquette’s  <MONS8PELEA>. The French-
Illinois dictionary of the missionary Antoine-Robert Le Boullenger (after
1719) also has it and spells it <mons8a>, and in the Illinois-French
dictionary (around the turn of the 18th century), commonly  attributed to
Jacques Gravier, we have the form that confirms this analysis: <mons8>.
          These historical transcriptions of <MONS8PELEA> clearly exhibit the
commonly occurring phenomenon of sibilant prenasalization, represented in this
term by orthographic <-ns->. Among the Great Lakes Algonquian languages this
phonological event is for all intents and purposes unique to Miami-Illinois.
In the Miami-Illinois language this prenasalization, as well as the optional
voicing in Old Illinois of  /-s-/ to [z], are non-contrastive features that
ultimately derive from the preceding /m/. This voicing of /s/ to [z] shows up
historically in Minet’s La Salle-based spelling <Mozopelea>.
          <-pelea>, the second segment of <MONS8PELEA>, is transparently Miami-
Illinois /pile:wa/‘turkey’. The /-w-/, present in the independent word
for “turkey,” does not occur in the composite term <Mosopeleacipi> because in
Miami-Illinois at the phonetic level, trisyllabic words with a short first
vowel such as /pileewa/ lose the /-w-/ when prefixed. This can be
illustrated , in fact, with another “turkey”-related word from the same
language, the word for the domestic turkey, which also loses /-w-/:
[waapipilia].(As one might expect, the term for the domestic turkey literally
means “white turkey”.)  Therefore, for our purposes, what these spellings
perfectly reflect is the same phonological reality as that found in
Marquette’s <MONS8PELEA>. The underlying /pileewa/of <MONS8PELEA>, just as
in /waapipilia/, is no longer trisyllabic and thus does not evince /-w-/ in
the actual, spoken form of this place-name.
          Of course, determining what language <Mosopelea> comes from and what
the ethnonym signifies is a rather simple affair when compared to the daunting
challenge of determining who the Mosopelea were. In truth, the only thing we
know for certain about the ethnic identity of these people is that they were
originally a middle Ohio Valley population whose lives were shattered in the
mid-1600s and reduced to just a few individuals by the Iroquois. That is
obviously not much to go on. Even though it is not the intent of this work to
explore in depth the question of this group’s identity, a few ideas that have
emerged from our onomastic research merit a brief mention.
          The Mosopelea could have been Shawnee speakers, as Wheeler-Voegelin
suggested, in spite of the fact that her hypothesis rests partially on her
mistaken belief that where they appear on Marquette’s map, the Shawnee appear
on the Franquelin-Jolliet map titled ‘Nouuelle Decouverte de Plusieurs Nations
Dans la Nouuelle France en L'annee 1673-1674’ and on Randin’s chart. On the
Franquelin-Jolliet map, however, the Shawnee are in fact living up a southern
tributary of the lower Ohio later identified cartographically as the “River of
the Shawnee”; and on the same map the Mosopelea are located below the Arkansas
River opposite the Taensa. On Marquette’s chart, the <MONS8PELEA> are just
below the mouth of the Ohio on the east bank of the Mississippi. Historical
accounts agree that the Mosopelea fled south out of the Ohio Valley when the
Iroquois invaded the region in the mid-1600s. Therefore, since we know that
the Shawnee had long established connections with southern tribes, the Taensa
for example, it is not impossible that the Mosopelea were Shawnee.
          Additional observations by Wheeler-Voegelin with respect to the
Mosopelea are noteworthy. Especially attractive is her suggestion that they
were the Indians described on the Manitoumie maps as having guns, and noted by
Marquette as being at war with the Quapaw. Furthermore, her statement that
some Seneca had told LaSalle in 1668-69 that the Mosopelea were Shawnee is
also curious. In fact, this is perhaps the best part of her theory. I would
agree her when she dismisses Swanton’s claim that the Mosopelea were Ofo, for
there is no ethno-historical evidence of this or other Siouan participation in
the region bracketed by the so-called Fort Ancient Tradition of the middle
Ohio valley, an area which was home to the proto-historic Mosopelea. Of
course, at the same time, no one has yet identified the late prehistoric Ohio
valley Siouans archaeologically.
          At this point, I could tentatively agree with Wheeler-Voeglin’s
hypothesis and further propose that Marquette’s  <MONS8PELEA> may refer to
either the Deer and Turkey clans of the Shawnee or the Deer band/moietie of
the Turkey clan of the Shawnee. Even so, this theory concerning the ethnic
identification of the Mosopolea requires additional and convincing support.

(Erminie Wheeler-Voegelin's ideas are in "Ethnohistory of Indian Use and
Occupation in Ohio and Indiana Prior to 1795, in David Agee Horr, ed.,
American Indian Ethnohistory/North Central and Northeastern Indiana, 2 vols.
(New York and London: Garland, 1974), volume 1, around pages 44-52.)

Michael