Comanche Grandmother

Q: Can you please tell me how you say "grandmother" in Comanche?

A:  Maternal grandmother (your mother's mother) is Kaku in Comanche (pronounced kah-koo). Paternal grandmother (your father's mother) is Huutsi (pronounced hoot-see.)

Hope that is what you were looking for. Have a good day!

Further reading:
Comanche language
The Comanches
Native American grandmother names   

How could Chwewamink turn into Wyoming?

Q: I saw on your website that the name of Wyoming came from a Native American word Chwewamink. How is that even possible? Those two words don't look anything alike!

A:  Have you ever seen children play a game of "telephone," where each child in line whispers a sentence to the next and eventually a sentence that started out as "I like to eat bread" ends up as "My mice are all dead"? The same thing basically happened with a lot of Native American placenames (and people's proper names as well, to the frustration of many people trying to trace their genealogy only to find the same ancestor's name spelled 16 different ways.) As the names were passed from person to person, none of whom even spoke the original language, they became changed, corrupted, and ultimately barely even recognizable.

In this case, the Lenape word "chwewamink" is actually pronounced similar to chwayo-wa-mink. The ch sound in the beginning is similar to the raspy "ch" in German "ach"; most English speakers couldn't pronounce that at all, so undoubtedly that was quickly simplified to wayo-wa-mink. "K" and "g" are easily mistaken for each other; now you've got wayo-wa-ming. Somebody probably had an accent in which "way" sounded more like "why"; now you've got why-o-wa-ming. Then somebody else contracted it to why-o-ming and there you are.

So how do people know what the actual origins of these names really are if they become that corrupted from the original source? Historical texts, mostly. The people who lived there at the time recorded plenty of intermediate forms and alternate spellings of the names that make it easier to guess where they came from, and also wrote down the purported meanings, which makes it easier to find out what the original Native American name could have been.

Hope that's interesting to you, have a good day!

Further reading:
Wyoming Indian history
Lenape language
Native American names  

Connection between the Inuit and the Shoshone

Q: I was Just wondering if you have ever found a connection between the Inuit and the Shoshone. If so where could I find the information? I am in a college anthropology
class, and my instructor who is an anthropologist has linked the Shoshone and the Aztec. Any information you could help me with would be greatly appreciated.

A:  Thank you for writing. I'm afraid I'm a little confused by your question, though. The title of your email talks about the Inuit, but the body talks about the Aztecs. Those are two completely different civilizations. The Aztecs are indigenous people of south-central Mexico. The Inuit, also known as the Eskimos, live in the Arctic.

Your professor is correct, the Shoshone are distant relatives of the Aztecs and speak a related language. Their shared language family is known as "Uto-Aztecan" and you can learn more about it here. A good book on Native American language families in general is The Languages of Native North America.

The Inuit languages are completely unrelated to the Uto-Aztecan languages.


Hope that helps, have a good day!
Native Languages of the Americas


Further reading:
Shoshone
Aztec/Nahuatl
Inuit  

How similar are Native American languages?

Q: Hello from Denmark.

 

I wonder: How similar are the different native languages? Could a Sioux understand a member of another band?

A:  Thanks for writing. There are multiple different language families of Native American languages. People who speak languages within the same language family can understand each other to varying degrees. So, a Sioux person could probably understand an Assiniboine person. Those two languages are very closely related. Maybe it could be compared to Danish and Swedish-- some words and pronunciations are different, but speakers can mostly follow each other. For a more distantly related Siouan language, such as Osage, maybe it could be compared to Danish and English-- it's easy to see how a lot of words are related if you look, even though people can't automatically understand each other. But for other languages that don't belong to the Siouan language family at all, such as Navajo, there is no relation and Sioux people couldn't understand those languages at all unless they studied them and learned them-- more like Danish and Japanese.

Hope that helps, have a good day!
Native Languages of the Americas


Further reading:
Siouan language family
Amerindian language families  

Cherokee for Heather

Q: My wife and I are expecting our first baby and want to name the little girl Heather. What would her Cherokee name be and is there any meaning behind that purple lil' flower named heather?

A:  Thanks for writing. There is no traditional Cherokee word for heather, because the heather plant was not originally native to North America. You will have the best luck finding words for heather in European languages, North African languages, and parts of Asia.


Here is a good website about the heather plant: http://www.scribd.com/doc/11936057/North-American-Heather-Society-Heather-Basics

Hope that helps, have a good day!
Native Languages of the Americas


Further reading:
Native American plants
Native American words  

American Indian word for Vegetarian

Q: Hello, could you please settle a bet by telling me the true meaning of the American Indian word for "vegetarian" in any dialect. Thanks.

A:  I'm sorry, but we don't know of any Native American language which has a native word for "vegetarian." To the best of my knowledge there was no indigenous tribe in the Americas which practiced true vegetarianism (although there are many with heavily plant-based traditional diets.) We have one Native American volunteer in our organization who is personally a vegetarian and the explanation she gives in her language literally is "does not eat meat."

The idea that there is some Native American tribe out there which embraces vegetarianism probably comes from one of two sources:

1) A common confusion about "Indian religion" or about "American Indians" versus "Indian Americans." Many Hindu, Jainist, or other people from the country of India do indeed practice vegetarianism, and the ambiguous name "Indian" has caused many mistakes over the years.

2) A story about a fictional tribe of Native Americans who are vegetarians and whose tribal name, which was given to them by an adjacent tribe, means "lousy hunters." This is a joke, not a true story.


Hope that helps, have a good day!
Native Languages of the Americas


Further reading:
American Indian food
American Indian words  

Aponi

Q: Hello, I am looking for the correct spelling and pronunciation of
the word butterfly. I see it most commonly spelled Aponi.
One website said it is a variant of the Blackfoot word
Apaniwa but that it is often shortened to just Apani. I have
seen it spelled: Aponi, Apani, Apponi, Appani, Aponni, Apanni,
Aponii, Apanii

Which of these, if any, are correct? If none of them are,
what is? I wish to be accurate and I know the internet is
not reliable. Thank You.

A:  Thanks for writing. The Blackfoot language was traditionally unwritten, so the spellings of Blackfoot words in English sometimes vary a lot, as you've seen. For the same reason there really is no "right" spelling. However, in the modern Blackfoot orthography (spelling system) which is most commonly used, this word is spelled Apaniiwa or just Apanii. ("-wa" is a common animate suffix in Blackfoot and is not always pronounced by all speakers of the language, so the word is sometimes pronounced uh-pah-nee-wuh and other times uh-pah-nee.)

Hope that helps, have a good day!
Native Languages of the Americas


Further reading:
Blackfoot language
Blackfoot tribe
Native American names