Names for the French

[Wallace Chafe]

There was a somewhat parallel development in Caddo, where the word for 
Frenchman is Ka:nush, which is evidently the last two syllables of 
Mexicanos, perhaps borrowed from Tonkawa with a regular Caddo 
palatalization of s after u. It seems to have started as a word for all 
Europeans, and then later on to be limited to the French, when Mexicans 
came to be called Ispayun.
--Wally

> Thanks for the clarification on ma capote.  As for is^padhoN, I agree
> that it is surprising that it is used for people of French origin.  That
> is what the last speakers I worked with in the 1980s and 1990s reported
> to me, without hesitation.