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prettygoodwordEnglish took a lot of terms from Algonquian languages, because they were the dominant local tongues on the northeastern seaboard of North America when English settlers arrived, including Powhatan, Massachusett, and Miꞌkmaq, as well as around the Great Lakes/southern Canada, including Cree, Ojibwe, and Shawnee. (Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Blackfoot, way to the west, are also Algonquian, but we didn’t take many words from them.) [Sidebar: The Iroquoian languages are unrelated, and while we got a lot of place names from those, we didn’t get many standard words.] All of which by way of explaining, just as for Nahuatl I needed to use a subset to have a manageable theme week, so for words from Algonquian languages -- this time, specifically animal names, starting with The Big Guy:
moose (MOOS) - (N.A.) n., a large deer (Alces alces) of northern North American and Eurasian forests, having a broad pendulous muzzle, humped shoulders, and large, palmate antlers in the male.
Thanks, WikiMedia!
Called elk in British English, which is confusing to me, as in North America that means a very different very large deer, Cervus canadensis, also called wapiti -- which latter name also comes from an Algonquian language, either Cree or Shawnee. [Sidebar: There are no moose/elk in the British Isles, and for a few centuries, "elk" generally meant any horse-sized cervid.] Moose are the largest living cervid, and the second largest land mammal of North America (bison bulk heavier, though they aren't as tall). We got the name around 1600 from an Eastern Algonquian language, compare Eastern Abenaki mos, Massachusett moos, Narragansett moos, and Penobscot mos, all of which derive from Proto-Algonquian *mo˙swa, "it strips", referring to how a moose strips tree bark when feeding.
---L.
moose (MOOS) - (N.A.) n., a large deer (Alces alces) of northern North American and Eurasian forests, having a broad pendulous muzzle, humped shoulders, and large, palmate antlers in the male.
Thanks, WikiMedia!
Called elk in British English, which is confusing to me, as in North America that means a very different very large deer, Cervus canadensis, also called wapiti -- which latter name also comes from an Algonquian language, either Cree or Shawnee. [Sidebar: There are no moose/elk in the British Isles, and for a few centuries, "elk" generally meant any horse-sized cervid.] Moose are the largest living cervid, and the second largest land mammal of North America (bison bulk heavier, though they aren't as tall). We got the name around 1600 from an Eastern Algonquian language, compare Eastern Abenaki mos, Massachusett moos, Narragansett moos, and Penobscot mos, all of which derive from Proto-Algonquian *mo˙swa, "it strips", referring to how a moose strips tree bark when feeding.
---L.
