bird.

[Koontz John E]

On Mon, 22 Nov 2004, R. Rankin wrote:
> No, I think not for several reasons.  Cherokee doesn't participate very
> much in the Southeast Sprachbund.  But the main problem is the
> affricate.  It's apparently reconstructible in Iroquoian, so any other
> SE language that borrowed it would have to have adopted [ts] as /t/, and
> that's extremely unlikely for languages like Muskogean and Siouan, both
> of which had /c/ phonemes they could have substituted but didn't.

Cherokee has tsiskwa 'bird' per David and Wally indicates that
"Proto-Northern-Iroquoian {has a] noun root *-tsi?t- for 'bird'" and that
the *tsi part of this is probably cognate with the Cherokee form, but he
didn't actually say that the Proto-Iroquoian would be *tsi.  Remembering
that affrication is often a parallel shift, and knowing essentially
nothing about Proto-Iroquoian (or recent Iroquoian), Northern or Southern
or combined, I was wondering if were possible that affrication were fairly
recent in at least the Cherokee case.

I agree that it seems more like that a ts would be borrowed as c^,
otherwise, given Muskogean and Biloxi phonology.