Northern Iroquoian bird

Wallace Chafe chafe at linguistics.ucsb.edu
Sun Nov 21 23:53:03 UTC 2004


In answer to Dave's question, although I haven't made a thorough
comparative study of this, I think one can reconstruct a
Proto-Northern-Iroquoian noun root *-tsi?t- for "bird". The ts usually
comes out as a voiced palatal affricate, so this is pronounced more like
-ji?t-. I'm using ? for a glottal stop. I suspect that the *tsi part is
cognate between PNI and Cherokee.

Wally

> (I'd welcome any info from the Iroquoianists on 'bird'
> from the northern Iroquoian languages to check if this is indeed
> Iroquoian, or a Cherokee renegade word possibly cognate with B and O
> perhaps through borrowing.)



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