Locatives and wa- problems.

[Rankin, Robert L.]

I have to admit that I’m very skeptical of 5 syllable long “coincidences”, so it seems to me more likely that ‘mirror’ is a loanword from either French or English that may have been reanalyzed in terms of the vertitive given in the new dictionary.

Be that as it may, though, the study of loanwords in Native languages is just beginning.  Most of the linguists who converted to Americanist interests have tended to “dabble” in the various languages.  It’s understandable that we have concentrated on basic phonology, morphology and syntax, but it takes more than that to uncover borrowings.  A lot of them are quite old and often have a native “look” to them.

mitákopa, mąčgú, etc. ‘bow’, as in ‘bow-and-arrow’, is a loan.  John Koontz has written about these.
Tobacco terms are widely borrowed.
wagmų́za, wadwą́, wičawą́, etc. ‘squash, pumpkin’ is a loan.
wagmiza, wamnáheza, etc. ‘corn’ are loan adaptations, based on ‘squash’.
hǫmnį́ke, hǫblį́ge, etc. ‘beans’ is a loan.  I covered these in the Histories of Maize anthology.
All the various ‘long knives’ and ‘fire water’ terms are loans or loan-translations.  Goddard has written about these and others.
All the saganaš, šągláša, sáznak, etc. terms are loans, as we know.
All the Dhegiha gðą́•ðe, lą́•ðe, lą́•ye, etc. terms for ‘big’ are loans from Spanish grande.  Pointed out by Quintero, Rankin and others.
The various kkáwa, kkawáye, etc. ‘horse’ terms are loans from Spanish.
othų́we, ttą́mą, htą́wą, etc. ‘town, band, settlement, etc.’ are probably loans.  My paper on Tomahitan deals with this.
šą́kka ‘nine’ is a loan either from Siouan to Algonquian or the other way around.
There are numerous names of wild animals that are widespread among North American language families.  Michael Nichols has written about these.

There are loans all over the place in Native languages, but unless you happen to know all the nearby languages, they don’t jump out at you like they do with European languages.  If you want to really get into the study of loans in Siouan, you should start with words that contain apparent reflexes of the long list of non-Siouan consonant clusters.  In Lakota start with gm, gw clusters, as in ‘trap’ for example.  You might expect to find Algonquian kw clusters as sources for these.  Other Dakotan clusters that seem to have peculiar combinations (that seem to be lacking in, say, Dhegiha) include sw, sm, šw, šm sorts of things.  I don’t even know if they are native or not.

In Chiwere dw clusters are similarly suspect.  And, as you know, these will turn up in Hochunk with a Dorsey’s Law vowel.  The CSD is a pretty fair starting place.

You can’t necessarily expect contact to be shown by loanwords however.  As Willem points out, some Native languages seem to resist direct lexical borrowing.  I personally don’t know whether this is literally true or whether it just looks that way because we, as individual linguists, haven’t had experience with enough of the different languages in a given area.

Hochunk is suspicious simply because it is surrounded by Algonquian, again as Willem notices.  Specifically, there is the pronoun I mentioned earlier.  Nį or nie is used for 1st person singular AND 2nd person sg.  We might expect this for 2sg, but where might ni refer to 1sg??  DING!  Right!  Algonquian.

And how about syllable structure?  Siouan languages permit a wide variety of clusters, but Hochunk doesn’t allow many of these.  Why not?  Does Dorsey’s Law result in a more Algonquian-like syllable structure?  There are various structural possibilities for demonstrating contact beyond loanwords though.

We still have much to learn.

Bob
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Bob, are you aware of any Algonquian influences on Hochunk? Despite their being an island of Siouan in a sea of Algonquian languages, they seem to have mixed very little with the Algonquians in Wisconsin. I'm not aware of a single Hochunk loan in any Algonquian language.

Dave

It’s hard to say whether the “different” Hochunk pattern represents a retention of something lost everywhere else or an innovation, perhaps brought on by extensive contact with Algonquian,

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