WINN TERM "FRENCH"

[Koontz John E]

On Thu, 2 Jun 2005, R. Rankin wrote:
> So what would /jimaNhoxge/ be then?

Well, it's pretty close to something that might be glossed 'to arrive
spitting on the ground', but I doubt that.  :-)

I'm not sure if =me=ra is a reasonable sequence syntactically, or if me (<
miN?e ???) would nasalize =ra.

The only attested j^i possibilities seem to be ji 'arrive here' and j^iN
'hit'.

The element maN has various possibilities, e.g., 'earth'.

A maNx- element might be 'field' or 'cloud'.

A final -ge would be *-ka, often used in forming deverbative nouns
referring to people and animals.

There are some possibilities for xge as a root, but none seemed to help.

I considered maN/osge and maN/os^ge without any better luck.

The usual sense of 'spirit', 'long knife', 'trickster', etc., don't seem
to help.  I don't see 'common' or 'real' either.

In short, an excellent conundrum.  Have you had any further ideas, Jimm?

I seem to recall something about a Winnebago term for French or some other
Euro-American group that involves "boat."  But that didn't seem to work
here, either.

I suppose this might be a loan, and hence not analyzable in Winnebago
terms, though xg is pretty much a Winnebago-only cluster, isn't it?