WINN TERM "FRENCH"

[Koontz John E]

On Thu, 2 Jun 2005, Jimm GoodTracks quoted this:
>  The Hotcâgara call the French, Waxopínixdjî`nîgra, "Little Much-Spirit"
> people, or Waxopíniskága, "White Spirit" people; or simply Waxopíniga,
> "Spirit" people. This last came to denote all white people.

I've been thinking about the assumptions underlying these quoted
explanations of the Winnebago terms.  I suspect that the term first
waxopi'ni(N) 'spirit' first applied to Europeans more or less by the same
logic by which was^ic^uN applied in Dakota, i.e., with the notion that
they were in some senses more in a class with 'spirits' than regular human
beings.  No doubt it rapidly became necessary to think in terms of two
distinct senses of waxo'piniN, i.e., 'spirit; whiteman'.  At the same
time, the term in the second sense denoted de facto the French, the only
Europeans in evidence.

Later as more varieties of Europeans became known and needed to be
distiguished there were essentially three meanings, 'spirit; whiteman;
Frenchmen'.  To distinguish the latter two, expedients like
waxopini(n)=xj^i(N) 'real whitemen' might be used for the last,
'Frenchmen'.  I suspect that -xj^iN here is meant in the sense of 'real,
original' along the lines that some groups use 'common, ordinary' +
'whiteman' for 'Frenchman'.  Various other expedients and terms no doubt
developed later.

Of course, this process wasn't happening just in isolation in Winnebago.
Actually it was occurring across multiple languages.  So while it's
conventional in folk etymology to explain a term like this as arising from
the first meeting, it might more likely arise from borrowing or calquing
of a term used by other Native Americans reporting the existence of
'spirit'-like beings many years before any appeared in the flesh.  For
example, perhaps Dakota was^ic^uN is a calque of waxopi'niN.  No doubt
there are plausible Algonquian models for waxopi'niN, too.

Of course, once terms are in circulation, languages might go quite
different ways with them, or replace some of them with local innovations
if these everyone's fancy.  For that matter, several different terms might
be in ciruclation at once, with one or the other becoming the preferred
alternative later, without necessarily replacing others entirely.

In more recent times, as Frenchmen became rare, terms that once meant
'Frenchman' might come to mean 'whitemen who fill the trading roles once
played by the French, e.g., Americans (or Canadians, or British)' or 'any
unusual variety of whiteman' or maybe even just 'whiteman' again.  An
interesting example of this sort of wandering of formations into new
territory turned up with Crow isbitchiihachkita, which as 'long knife'
resembles etymologically the terms in some other languages (Dakotan,
Omaha-Ponca) for 'American'.  I'm not sure which application of the
etymology came first.  We're used to 'long knife' being explained in terms
of US Cavalry sabres, but if the term originally applied to the French,
then the cavalry sabre explanation seems to be folk etymology.  It's a bit
difficult to see how a term for 'American' would transfer to 'Frenchman'.