Colorado typonyms.

[Rankin, Robert L]

I was looking at a map of the Southwest and noticed that, in SE Colorado between the towns of Eads and Lamar there are several lakes or resevoirs. They seem to have names in some Dhegiha dialect, as most if not all of them can easily be read in Osage, Omaha, Ponca or Kaw. They are (in their Anglicized spellings from the map):

Neeskah

Neegronda

Neesopah

Neenoshe

Nee is obviously /niN/ 'river, lake'. -skah, -gronda, -sopah are attempts at 'white', 'big', 'black'. -(n)oshe may be 'full' or 'principle', as in "Neosho". Does anyone know how these lakes were named? It's hard to tell what precise language they are in. Osage and Kansa both reduce the Spanish loanword 'grande' to /laNdhe/ or /laNye/ through regular loss of the initial /g/, but that happened in historical times, as Dorsey still wrote a few of them a century ago. The other languages do not apparently have this Spanish word, although it may just not have been encountered by linguists. This area is pretty far west for the southern Siouan tribes to have penetrated except on hunting parties, but the Comanches borrowed 'bear' from Osage, so contact wasn't out of the question. It was just a little surprising to find these names so far afield. I'd have written one off to coincidence, but certainly not all 4.

Bob