white bear (fwd)

[Koontz John E]

I should have known to copy this to the list.
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 8 Jun 2006 13:19:19 -0600 (MDT)
From: Koontz John E <John.Koontz at Colorado.EDU>
To: Ives Goddard <GODDARDI at si.edu>
Cc: john.koontz at Colorado.EDU, rankin at ku.edu, m.mixco at m.cc.utah.edu,
     rbvezina at yahoo.ca
Subject: Re: white bear

On Thu, 8 Jun 2006, Ives Goddard wrote:
> Dear Siouanists:
> Robert Vézina, the Canadian grad student working on early No. American
> French, wonders if "ours blanc" (=grizzly) could have an Indian origin,
> since members of the Lewis and Clark expedition report this as an Indian
> expression when they spot one of these at the end of April, 1805, when
> they have left the Mandan villages and are in western Montana.  He's
> found the Lakota expression meaning 'gray bear'.  Does another language
> use 'white' for this creature?

The languages I know refer to grizzlies as *ma(N)tHo' or developments,
e.g., OP maNc^Hu'.  This is a special term with no obvious internal
analysis.  The set is a bit irregular, because Dakotan tH (t-raised h -
an aspirate) is normally develops as h.  I( think the Teton name of
Devil's Tower is matho' thathipi 'grizzly bear his-house'.

Most modern Mississippi Valley Siouan languages seem to refer to black
bears as 'black one', cf. Santee (Riggs) wasa'pe=daN 'little ~', Stoney
wasa'be=n 'little ~', OP wasa'be.  There's an Assiniboine term hu'te that
matches Crow buushi and Winnebago huNuN'c^, etc. (more or less), to
suggest PS *w(a)-hut-e ~ *w(a)-huNt-e.  Here I'm relying on the draft
(database) of the Comparative Siouan Dictionary.

I see that Buechel gives matHo and glosses it as 'the gray or polar bear',
explaining in a sub entry that matHo' xo'ta (literally 'gray bear') means
'grizzly bear'.  This glossing is taken over from Riggs, with suppression
of his incorrect or obsolete binomials.  It appears that Williamson, an
alternative view into the early work with Santee, gives "mat[H]o[']ska"
['white matHo'') for 'polar bear'.  He also gives (under bear), mat[H]o[']
'bear', wahaN[']k[-]s^ic^a [destroyer evil] 'black bear', mat(H)o(')
xo(')ta; s^ake['][-]haNska [claws long] 'gray bear'.

Actually, though I'm assuming, and I think others are, too, that wahaNk-
is related to wahaNk=ya 'to destroy; one who destroys', it looks like it's
within reason as a match for the wahu(N)te set.  The -e is essentially a
formant, the status of which is debated, but it is regularly deleted in
compounding, and t-s would dissimilate regularly to k-s.  We have some
sets with aN ~ uN under circumstances not fully understood, and I have
found rampant vowel variation in some Dakotan sets before, where any
affective conisxeration or avoidance situation was involved.

There seems to be a folk supposition here that any any large non-black
bears must be connected somehow.  Bearing in mind that folk taxonomy
doesn't produce the same species lists as scientific taxonomy, and that
color is a very important feature in it - consider the Siouan
terminologies for eagles and remember that scientific taxonomists have a
hard time convincing everybody that the color of a black bear is
irrelevant - I wouldn't be surprised to find that matHo' ska' or matHo'
xo'ta might have been in early use for "non-black bears" of species Ursus
ursus or Ursus maratimus.  (Hope my terminology is up to date!)  A certain
amount of confusion may have been produced by the 'silver tipped'
character of the grizzly's coat.

I'm not sure how and when it was necessary to distinguish more than
matHo', but I have an idea.  It seems to me that the whole business of
what kind of bear a bear was must have been moderated by the fur trade for
many years before Riggs & company, or even Lewis & Clark were in the
picture, and the explanation of many oddities in Native American and early
colonial use might be explained by looking at the inventory lists for
Hudson's Bay and others.  The terminology of furriers for animals is as
peculiar as the terminology of lumberjacks for trees, and for analogous
reasons.

I remember that we'be been puzzled before by names like "Black Cat" and I
remember a question some years ago in the Algonquian newsletter about
pekans.

I'll be interested to hear how this comes out!