More about the weather

Tuesday, the weather report said "overcast" and it rained all day. Yesterday was cloudy Downtown, according to monshu, but up here it cleared up mid-morning and stayed that way all day. By afternoon, monshu had to turn on the AC, the strong western sun had heated up his place so much. Today, the weather report was "cloudy, possibility of rain"; I don't know what it's like further south, but up in Evanston there is literally not a cloud in the sky.

monshu says it's all Ernesto's fault; he's stalling a system just east of us, so we're getting counterclockwise weather patterns centred on the Lake. This usually means everything's up for grabs as far as what to expect from the sky. Last night, I pointed out the little clouds scuttling southwards past the sunset and said, "Look at that! It's unnatural!"

No geese the past two nights, but I was more than a bit surprised to see that one of the locusts outside my window is already turning golden in a few spots. It's like waking up one morning and finding white hairs on the head of your younger boyfriend. At least the back is better, so I may actually be able to get some walking in this weekend. I've missed it; the world around me is changing more quickly by the day and I'm missing it all!

Rivers run through it

Many years ago now, I spent a chunk of my free time helping the friendly Basque organiser of the GeoNative web site research some of the more obscure minority languages of the world. In particular, I scoured the Amerind dictionaries of the Reg ferretting out native names of American geographical features. I was happy to do it, though I didn't foresee that my credit would mean several years of complete strangers contacting me for help with languages I knew next to nothing about.

It's nice to see he still has the site going, even if some features (like the clunky ASCII-based respellings) haven't aged so well. In fact, I'd like to update it with some Osage names, though I'd first like see Quintero's dictionary so I can get the spellings right. (I have to say, LaFlesche's orthography really drives me batty. The whole practice of separating each syllable with hyphens, e.g. I'n-ba-pa-we-tsi'n for a name Quintero would write ?įįpahpawachį, simply smacks so heavily of cheesy summer camps and aging tourist traps that it gives me hives.)

So far, I've had particular success in identifying river names. Perhaps because the Osage are relatively latecomers to the area (they may have migrated from the Ohio Valley as late as the 16th century), these tend to be simple and transparent. So far I have:

Níišoce ["water-smoky"] the Missouri River (probably a reference to its siltiness; LaFlesche adds that the name of Kansas City is Níišoce htãwã "Missouri Town")
Níihtãhka ["water-big"] the Mississippi River
Níižuuce ["water-red"] the Red River or Arkansas River
Níižuucehtãka ["water-red-big"] the Arkansas River
Níižuucehžĩka ["water-red-little"] the Little Arkansas River
Níibraska ["water-flat"] the Platte River (points for recognising that the French name is a translation of the Siouan; you can imagine how I squealed when I recognised this as the origin of the name of Nebraska)
?Níiožo the Neosho River ("water-clear" according to Wikipedia, but I've been unable to confirm the second element; LaFlesche spells it u-zhu and glosses it "main, principal")
Níiska ["water-white"] the Little Osage River (Quintero points out that ska is also used for "clear" when speaking of water, speech, etc.)