Autonym of Mosopeleas-Ouesperies-Ofos

[Rankin, Robert L]

I think, unfortunately, that it's too much to expect ethnonyms to have intrinsic meaning.  'Baxoje' doesn't, 'KkaaNze' doesn't, 'Waz^az^e' doesn't, 'PpaNkka' doesn't.  Why should Mosopelea necessarily?  The terms often get folk etymologies ("dusty noses", "wind people", etc.), but these were probably never real.  When names (or any words) are borrowed by speakers of a totally different language, morphological analysis of the donor language is not ordinarily performed -- a convenient gestalt is simply taken, often truncating the original term if it was several syllables.  For me at any rate, it's 'way too late to try to second guess the Tunicas on why they adopted the chunk they did.  Since truncation usually comes off the right-hand side of the name, I assume the Ofos had already lost the initial labial (Swanton's progression of names down the Ohio and Mississippi confirms this, and the same loss in Biloxi suggests it was very early).  I strongly doubt that any non-OVS language lost initial labial sonorants spontaneously, so, to me it all pretty strongly supports identification of Swanton's ethnonyms and Tunica ushpi with the Ofos.

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>>> Swanton's idea was that Tunica /us^pi/ is the remains of the "osope" of Mosopelea.

>> Actually, I suppose that might work if we assume that the -pe/-pi ending was a modifier, making Moso-pe as a name meaning, perhaps, "Little Ofo", or some such thing.  (Nothing promising in the Ofo dictionary though!)

> It doesn't have to have a meaning in Tunica.  They couldn't parse it.