Colorado typonyms.

[Carolyn Quintero]

Osage nii + ska may also be 'water'+ 'calm, peaceful'.  

niilaaNdhe 'big water' and niisape 'black water' seem right.  

The last one could be nii-naaNz^iN with 'stand', I suppose, perhaps 'water
one can stand in', but the construction is odd. Another possibility for
neenoshe would be nii - odhós^i with odhós^i 'in the way, blocking, in the
middle of e.g. a road or path', with a typical n~dh variation.  
Carolyn 

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-siouan at lists.colorado.edu
[mailto:owner-siouan at lists.colorado.edu] On Behalf Of Rankin, Robert L
Sent: Tuesday, July 11, 2006 7:15 AM
To: Siouan at lists.colorado.edu
Subject: Colorado typonyms.

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




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