Native American words

The indigenous peoples of North America speak well over 200 different languages, with many more having become extinct in the last few centuries. When European settlers arrived in North America, they brought with them their own ideas about names for the natural world and often transferred them to local fauna and flora due to some perceived similarity. Thus the American robin is a very different bird from the European one but does share its red breast, and poison ivy is not ivy. However, the settlers were presented with many plants and animals that were unfamiliar, and they often then borrowed the local names, although many got very changed in the process. Thus the name of the raccoon [E17th] is a borrowing of Algonquian aroughcun, a name which appears in all sorts of wild spellings in early records. The opossum [E17th] (or possum) is also Algonquian but closer to its original opassom, which means ‘white dog’, and Algonquian also gives us the terrapin [E17th] from a lost word similar to Abnaki turepé. Moose [E17th] and skunk [M17th] come from mos and segankw in the Abnaki language, and chipmunk [M19th] is from Ojibwa jidmoonh. The pecan nut [M18th] gets its name via the French settlers of the Mississippi Valley’s word pacane from the Illinois language’s pakani, and the hickory [L17th] is a shortening of earlier pohickory from pawcohiccora. This is again an Algonquian word, this language showing up so often because it was one of the dominant languages in areas occupied by early European settlers. When English speakers reached the far West, they encountered the beautiful and delicious shellfish abalone [M19th], a word they picked up from the American Spanish abalón, which had borrowed it from the northern Californian language Rumsen, where it was awlun.

 Certain aspects of Native American culture have become common currency in English. All sorts of conical tents are now sold as tepees or teepees [M18th], from their similarity to the original Sioux tīpī, ‘dwelling’, originally a highly portable dwelling suited to the Plains-dwelling peoples’ nomadic lifestyle. This is sometimes confused with the wigwam [E17th], which was a permanent dome-shaped council building of the Eastern tribes. It comes from Ojibwa wigwaum and Algonquian wikiwam meaning ‘their house’. Also from Ojibwa is the word totem [M18th] from nindoodem ‘my totem or tribe’. The word moccasin [E17th] is found in several North American languages, but was probably borrowed, once again, from Algonquian moccasin. The toboggan [E19th] comes via Canadian French from Micmac topaĝan ‘sled’.

 In the far north we find the languages of the Inuit, a plural of inuk ‘person’. The name, first found in the mid 18th century, is partly a borrowing from Eastern Canadian Inuit, and partly from the related Greenlandic: the word is the same in both languages. The term Eskimo [L16th] is out of favour, partly because of an incorrect, offensive etymology which was in circulation claiming it meant ‘one who eats raw flesh’. In fact it probably means ‘one who makes (rawhide) snowshoes’. The word arrived via Spanish and Canadian French from the language of people the French called Montaignais ‘of the mountains’. It comes from aïachkimeȢ used to mean a Micmac person, and from Cree ayaskīmēw, and was originally applied to a number of different tribal groupings. Curiously the husky dog [M19th] gets its name from Huskemaw, a Newfoundland dialect form of ‘Eskimo’, it being an ‘Eskimo dog’. Inuit has given us kayak [M18th] from qayaq, igloo [M19th] from iglu ‘house’, and from Greenlandic anorak [E20th] from anoraq, while the parka [L18th] comes, via Russian, from another member of the family, Aleut, spoken in Alaska and Russia.

 See also buck, hatchet.