MASCOUTIN

[Koontz John E]

On Thu, 26 May 2005 mmccaffe at indiana.edu wrote:
> The precise origin of the ethnonym “Mascouten” is not known, but its
> meaning is clear. “Mascouten” is definitely cognate with Old Illinois
> /maskoteenta/ ‘small-prairie person’. This name appears to allude to the
> Prairie Peninsula of southwestern Michigan or even to small prairies in
> northwestern Ohio.

Or, in short, to those parklands created by burning over the grasslands to
kill the saplings!  Isn't the term Prairie Peninsula applied to the tall
grass prairie east of the Mississippi and between the Ohio and Great Lakes
generally?

Could the diminutive here be in opposition to another 'prairie people'
group?  In other words, could it apply to the ethnic group as opposed to
the prairies?  Analogies would be Yankton (ihaNk-thuNwaN 'end people') and
Yankto*nais* (ihaNk-thuNwaN=*na* 'little end people'), or Shahi(ya) 'Cree'
(obsolete usage)  vs. Shahiye=na 'Cheyenne, i.e., Little Cree', or, for
that matter, Nottoway 'Iroquois' vs.  Nadou*ess*ioux 'Sioux'?  I may not
be bounding the diminutive morpheme correctly in Algonquian!

There is a notable analogy to the 'Prairie People' in Siouan nomenclature,
though I don't mean to suggest that it would be the group relative to
which the Mascouten could perhaps be 'little' or 'lesser prairie people'.

This analogy is Teton, of course.  This is thi-thuNwaN or thi-people
today, but seems earlier to have been thiN-thuNwaN (Riggs, Grammar, p.
161), said to be contracted from thiNta 'prairie', not thi 'dwell(ing)'.
(For similar glosses by others, see Ray DeMallie's Sioux Until 1850 (HBNAI
13:718-760), e.g., LeSueur 1699-1702, mentioned p. 723.

I suspect that this original form wasn't some arbitrary contraction, but
derives with only slight irregularity from something like *thiNl=thuNwaN,
with thiNl- (or thiNd-, the regularly formed combining form of thiNta
'prairie' (Riggs, p. 469, but not carried over into Buechel), with the -l
(or -d) coming out [n] after a nasal vowel.  Compare the handling of
c^haNte' 'heart' in c^haNl-was^te 'happy'.  I suspect that in this context
it would be easy to lose that -n in a context like VN__#th, while perhaps
its historical presence also helps explain the tendency of the root in
this form to denasalize.

The Proto-Dhegiha form *htaNte, cf. OP ttaN'de 'ground, ground surface,
soil', Os htoN'ce 'earth or ground; prairie without trees', Ks ttaN'j^e
'ground' seems to be a reasonable if slightly irregular cognate of Dakotan
thiNta.  The change in the root vowel iN in the latter is what's unusual,
but this occurs elsewhere, too, e.g.,

'shoe' Da haN'pa/thahaN'pe '~/his ~', OP hiNbe', hiN'be, Os hoNbe', Ks
hoNbe', Qu hoNbe' (another form entirely is used in IO and Wi, cf. IO
agu'j^e, Wi waguj^e');

'grizzly' Da ma(N)tho' (but expect *maNho'?), OP maNc^hu', Os miNcho, Ks
miNc^ho', Qu moNc^ho', IO ma(N)tho', Wi maNc^o';

'bow' Dakota ita'(zipa), by reanalysis of *miNta+zipa as first person
possessive, OP maN'de, Os miN'ce, Ks miN'j^e, Qu maN'tte, IO
 maNhdu < *maNktu < *maNtku by a regular metathesis, Wi maNaNc^gu'.

The main difficulty here is that the vowel change in question is irregular
as to which language it occurs in.  And under the circumstances it is hard
to say which vowel is changing to which, though I tend to assume majority
rule aN is original in each case and iN is the innovation.

The last set - 'bow' - is an Algonquian loan, or perhaps better, a
collection of Algonquian loans, which may to some extent explain the
vowel, i.e., maNt ~ miNt (or *waNt ~ *wiNt) reflects *ment in the
Algonquian source languages.  I'm not aware of any of the other examples
as loans, though 'grizzly' has the additional oddity of *th not becoming h
in Dakotan (compare Dakota phehaN vs. OP ppethaN < *hpethaN 'crane', or
Dakota hi vs. OP thi < *thi 'arrive here').  Maybe all of the aN ~ iN
forms with their oddities are also loans, even if we don't know the
sources in some cases.