'town'

[David Costa]

These Algonquian 'town' forms are all nominalizations of */o:te:-/. 
Moreover, as Ives has pointed out, there is a corresponding medial
*/-o:te:-/ which can be seen in constructions like Miami /minooteeni/
'town', Menominee /meno:tE:w/ 'he goes partners with someone' and Fox
/meno:tani/ 'the enemy side'. (PA */men-/ = 'grouped apart')

There are reshapings to the nominalizing endings that I think Ives has
discussed somewhere, but otherwise it's regular. (And yes, */-weni/ is a
very productive nominalizing suffix.) The morphology looks quite old to me.

Ojibwe /nindoodem/ 'my totem' is cognate, it's /nin-d-oode-m/, where the
possessive prefix is /nin-/, the first /d/ is epenthetic, and the /m/ marks
possessed themes.

One could debate the semantics of PA */o:te:-/, but these forms are all
related, which is the main point.

Frank Siebert noticed this Algonquian/Siouan resemblance back in the 1960's.
What he said was "If the correspondence is more than fortuitous, the
borrowing must have occurred in the earliest Proto-Algonquian times. It
would appear that Siouan was probably the donor language." However, note
that he qualifies the hell out of that statement, he doesn't explain why he
thinks it went that direction, and he seems not to have been aware of the
other derived forms sharing the same initial.

In defense of the idea of it being a Siouan -> Algonquian loan, word-initial
*/o:/ is rather uncommon in Proto-Algonquian.

All I can think of...

Dave


> 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.
>

>> 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.