moose

[prettygoodword]

English 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.

Comments

[full_metal_ox]

…for a few centuries, "elk" generally meant any horse-sized corvid.] Moose are the largest living corvid…

Autocorrect problems?

[prettygoodword]

Er, no, brain fart (this browser's dictionary doesn't know either cervid or corvid).

[phantasmalpoison]

Oh, that clears up the elk and moose situation! For once, I choose to stick with the American names, as I believe is common – I suspect basically everyone I know in the UK would call it a moose. I mean, as a foreign animal, it largely shows up in foreign media with the 'foreign' name, it's logical enough that moose would prevail.

I recently saw that the term 'moose' was used for the animal in the first episode of Jeeves and Wooster in 1990, and while it was an incident I don't recognise from Carry On Jeeves (I've only read the first book), doing a search for the word in Right Ho, Jeeves (1934) on Project Gutenberg, P.G. Wodehouse also used moose instead of elk, albeit in different circumstances (comparing Jeeves's stoic expression to that of a stuffed moose).

He did spend a lot of time in the US, but still. It's a moose!

[prettygoodword]

So possibly that "Called elk" should be corrected to "sometimes/formerly"?

Wodehouse is probably not the best guide to British (in contrast to American) usage, at least not from, say, 1914 on, given his general residency. Not to mention, a stuffed elk is nowhere near as funny a phrase as stuffed moose. I mean seriously, the sounds.

[phantasmalpoison]

I think so, although representing a whole nation is quite the responsibility :)

No, of course, of course, although it's funny to me that my most recent encounter with the word 'moose' was a 'quintessentially British' tv show from 35 years ago.
If it helps anything, Google search trends for 'moose' and 'elk' in the UK show 'moose' as pretty consistently above 'elk', except in Northern Ireland. The people love [comparatively] to search for moose.

Stuffed moose, footloose, kick off your Sunday shoes.