Giving thanks for Native American words
I鈥檓 from Wisconsin, where hundreds of place names have Native American origins. I grew up in Milwaukee, Ojibwa/Potawatomi for 鈥減leasant land鈥� or 鈥済athering place by the water.鈥� My parents are from Sheboygan 鈥� 鈥渘eedle鈥� or 鈥減athway between the waters.鈥� And we go to Minocqua, or 鈥渘oon-day rest,鈥� on vacation. Wisconsin itself probably comes from meskonsing, a Miami word meaning 鈥渋t lies red,鈥� which describes the Wisconsin River as it runs through red sandstone bluffs. Wisconsin isn鈥檛 unusual: Twenty-six US state names seem to derive from Native American words, from Alabama to Ohio to Wyoming.
Native American languages have also given English many common names of plants and animals. When Europeans arrived in North America, they encountered lots of species they had never seen before and often adopted the names in use around them. English thus got skunk from the Massachusett people, chipmunk and muskellunge 鈥� 鈥渦gly pike鈥� 鈥� from the Ojibwa, and raccoon, opossum, and moose from various other Algonquian languages. Caribou is an Anglicization of the Mi鈥檏maq qalipu, meaning 鈥渟now-shoveler,鈥� because in winter these large reindeer dig in the snow to find lichens. Several of our names for different kinds of salmon come from languages of the Pacific Northwest: sockeye and coho are from Halkomelem, which also gave us Sasquatch, the legendary Bigfoot.
Before we called pumpkins and zucchini squash, they were known as squanter-squash or even isquoutersquashes, closely resembling their linguistic ancestor, the Narragansett askutasquash. Pecan comes from Algonquian terms that identify 鈥渘uts with shells that must be cracked with a stone鈥� and once included hickory nuts and walnuts.听
These are only a few of the words that English has adopted from Native American languages; the list could go on for hundreds of pages and include words in the spheres of technology, politics, and insult.
The exchange also worked in the other direction, although evidence for it is scarce. Most speakers of Native American languages did not keep written records, and almost half of the languages themselves are now extinct, with many more on the verge.听
In 1643 Roger Williams published a Narragansett-English phrasebook in which he noted that the Indians had adopted English words to identify the strange new creatures the Pilgrims and Puritans had brought. They Narragansett-ized the names of the imported animals, producing 肠么飞蝉苍耻肠办, 驳么补迟别蝉耻肠办, 丑贸驳蝉耻肠办, and 辫铆驳蝉耻肠办.听
On Thanksgiving I鈥檒l be thinking about this legacy of linguistic exchange 鈥� and linguistic annihilation.
