Something fishy in the State of Wisconsin

[muckefuck]

In my quest for Osage materials online, I've been mildly surprised by how much there is available for other Siouan languages. It's been over a year since I discovered John E. Koontz' websuite, but somehow in all that time I never bothered to check out the archive for the Siouan mailing list that he maintains. (How could I have guessed there'd be an extensive discussion of the origin of the Creole name Paincourt for my hometown of St. Louis?) And I didn't even think to look for sites on Missouria, since the fact that information on this variety was so hard to come by is why I took up Osage in the first place. (For years, I've wanted to learn a native language of my home state, but I couldn't find any decent materials.) Lo and behold, I discover that a man named Jimm Good Tracks has since put up a beautiful site. Had I only known about it earlier, it might've changed the history of this blog!

When I first heard of the Ho-Chunk casino, I thought it was a name made-up to sound "Indian"; I had no idea there actually was a Ho-Chunk Nation. (In my defence, they only officially adopted that name in 1994.) Even less did I, with my extremely patchy knowledge of both Amerind history and Amerind language families, suspect that they spoke a Siouan language closely related to both Missouria and Osage. I've now read in several places that they reverted to the autonym because of the unsavoury connotations of "Winnebago", which supposedly means "those with a fishy smell" in the languages of their Algonkian neighbours. (Connotations which don't seem to bother the Nebraska branch of the tribe, but I guess they don't have to deal with sneering Potawatomis in the local Aldi quite so much.)

I never gave any thought about what the name Ho-Chunk (or, in the official native Orthography, Hocąk) might mean until I stumbled across the Osage version in LaFlesche's dictionary. I immediately recognised the first element as ho "fish" and the second as ttãhkã "big, great". (Dropping final vowels appears to be regular change in the Hocąk language, as does affrication and fronting of /tt/.) Maybe the Ojibwe et al. weren't so far off after all? Except the tribal website glosses hocąk as "big voice". So, at this point, I'm not sure whether I'm dealing with a homonym, an error in LaFlesche (who apparently had a lot of trouble transcribing vowels correctly), or what.

On a final note, here's what John Koontz has to say about the Winnebago/Hocąk and their self-designation in his excellent FAQ:

I want to give my RV a Native American name.

This was received as a facetious question, but in my opinion, you could scarcely improve on Ho'thaNke (HO-tahng-kay) - I'd spell it Hotanke - which is Dakotan for 'Winnebago', unless maybe you wanted to go with the Winnebago version. I'm not sure I would. I think they're still a little steamed about the whole thing.

Appendix : Comparison of Siouan names for the Hocąk
Hocąk: Hocąk ['ho'ʧãk]
Dakota: Ho'thaNke ['hoʔtʰãke]
Osage: Hottãhkã ['hʊ't:ãhkã]
Chiwere: Hotúŋe [ho'tuŋe]

Comments

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Now isn't that interesting? Your smokes are actually provided by a company named "Ho-Chunk, Inc.". So "Winnebago" is good enough for the tribe itself, but not its development arm.

[lhn.livejournal.com]

Data point: back when ads for the Ho-Chunk Casinos in Wisconsin (which AFAICT are operated by the Wisconsin Winnebago separately from the Nebraska branch of the tribe, though their site mentions some joint ventures) were regularly showing up on WBBM news radio, they always prominently mentioned the welcome of "the Winnebago nation".