What's the matter with Kanza?

Belatedly, it occurs to me that I'm looking in the wrong place for corroboration in trying to make sense of LaFlesche's vocabulary. I've been using my Lakota/Dakota dictionaries because they're handy, not because the language is particularly close to Osage. They're both members of the Mississippi Valley Branch, but Osage belongs to a southerly grouping called "Dhegiha". Dhegiha consists of three branches: Omaha-Ponca, Osage-Kansa, and Quapaw. And guess what? The Kaw Nation have a lovely website for Kanza that includes online vocabulary lists.

Of course, just because a word is found in Kanza, it's no guarantee that the Osage cognate exists or is in common use. For instance, the Kanza word for "mosquito", yáphoyinge pázota (lit. "sharp-nosed fly") is nothing like the Osage, which is lapxąąke. And even with cognates, there are slight differences, e.g. Kanza shó~mikase hi~ zìhi "coyote" (lit. "yellow fur coyote") vs. Osage šomįhkasi. (This kind of divergence in nasalisation seems especially common. Cf. Kanza mósho~ ~ mósho "feather" vs. Osage mǫšǫ "idem.")

Nevertheless, the Kanza vocabulary preserves many distinctions that LaFlesche mangles or ignores, so it's a useful corrective. (The main shortcoming I've found so far are that Kanza seems to lack phonemic vowel length, something Quintero describes but LaFlesche consistently leaves unmarked.) For instance, Kanza mónga "skunk" suggests that LaFlesche really did transcribe the first vowel correctly and I should be writing mǫka instead of mąka. (Not that it makes an immense difference: The two vowels are very similar and were often confused even by competent Osage speakers.) And it looks like I got the etymology right on "opossum"--but more on that later.

Pépé le puant

I don't know why I'm so fascinated by animal names in other languages. I suppose it has something to do with their abundance of salient characteristics. It's always interesting to see which ones a particular culture will seize upon when it comes time to find a name to call them by. It often tells you something about how the culture views (or once viewed that creature) and their interactions with it. In a similar way, the etymology of the names can tell you some interesting things about the history of cultural relations.

That's because there are two basic strategies for naming a new species that one comes across: Deriving a name from existing elements and borrowing one from a culture which has already given it one. We see both strategies applied to New World fauna in English: Chipmunks, opossums, raccoons, skunks, woodchucks, and other creatures bear altered American Indian (generally Algonkian) names.

On the other hand, a muskrat is a kind of rat that produces musk, a white-tailed deer is a kind of deer with a white tail, a bobcat is a cat with a bobtail, and a prairie dog lives on the prairie and looks sorta like a dog. And some animals come in for both treatments, like the puma (a Quechua word) or cougar (Guarani), a.k.a. mountain lion, panther, or catamount and the wapiti or elk. (Confusingly, "elk" is used in Europe for moose and I've never quite understood how we came to call them by an Abenaki word and reassign "elk" to a species of deer.)

Of course, the same strategies are found in other languages. As I remarked to innerdoggie in a comment to this entry, Basque mofeta wears its foreign origins like sports jersey at a folk dance festival. They obviously got this word from the Spanish, but where did they find it? The -eta ending screams "Catalan" to me, so I checked the GDLC and found that they favour an Italian origin. The etymon is mofetta, which exists in English as a vulcanologist's term for discharges of pestilent vapour associated with volcanic activity.

This word also turns up in France in the fully Frenchified form moufette, but the Cajuns went their own way with bête puante, lit. "stinking beast". They weren't the only colonials to do so. Spanish speakers seem either to have highlighted its vulpine qualities (Argentine zorrino and Uruguayan/Central American zorrillo are both diminutives of zorro "fox") or taken the route of least resistance and called it by the same names as the natives, such as mapurite (from some Carib language), añás (from Quechua), or chingue--a Chilean name which looks pretty racy to my Chicano-conditioned ears. The Brazilians follow suit with their cangambá.

You wonder if the Dutch and Germans, with their stinkdieren bzw. Stinktiere ("stinkbeasts") have somehow been talking to the Cajuns, but they also have room for good-ol' Algonkian skunk. It seems likely they influenced the Finns and their haisunäätä ("stink marten") unless the the poor bugger's stinkiness is simply so inspiring as to make such coinages irresistable.