'town'

[Koontz John E]

On Wed, 9 Nov 2005, David Costa wrote:
> Probably not. The Proto-Algonquian form is reconstructible as */o:te:weni/,
> a nominalization off an initial */o:te:-/. */-o:te:-/ can be reconstructed
> as meaning 'to dwell together as a group', and the same morpheme can be seen
> in Ojibwe /nindoodem/ 'my totem'. The morpheme seems too deeply embedded
> across Algonquian to be a loan.
>
> So either it's a coincidence or Siouan borrowed it from Algonquian.

It might helpful to investigate this somewhat further.  Are all the
Algonquian corespondences regular?  Are there other examples of this
pattern of nominalization in -weni?  Also, I'm not sure that the 'totem'
example is an altogether convincing case of 'dwell together in a group',
so I assume there must be other cases of *o:te:- in this sense?

I think we have other cases where Algonquian forms with -e(n)- match
Siouan ones with nasal vowels: 'bow', for example, cf. Siouan forms
seeming to imply *waNaNt(ku) or *maNaNt(ku) vs. PA (approx.!) *mentekw-a.