Inkanta
Group: Admins
Posts: 1453
Joined: Feb. 2000 |
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Posted: Mar. 31 2005, 13:41 |
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Henry Schoolcraft and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow were good friends, btw. You'll find many spellings of both names because they varied among nations and the orthographers who attempted to translate oral languages into written ones used different spellings, based on their own languages (primarily French and English). Manabozho was Ojibwe/Chippewa/Anishinaabe. The native words used in SOH are from the Anishinaabe language, Anishinaabemowin, which is from the Algonquin (going into a trance) family. Aiionwatha is actually an Oneida spelling. Oneida, Seneca, Tuscarora, Onondaga, Erie, Huron, Mohawk, and Cayuga are from the Iroquian language family. One of my anthropology profs (a linguist) once said that the Iroquois and Algonquin language families are as closely related as English is to Chinese, i.e., not very. I'm not sure what the current thinking is, but it's one reason (and actually a minor one) why it doesn't make sense that Longfellow would have combined a culture hero from the Ojibwe with a guy who helped found one of the longest-lived democracies on the planet (i.e., the Iroquois League of Nations). I have a bunch of stuff on this that I could round up for you, if you're interested, and when my home laptop comes back online a bit more reliably.
-------------- "No such thing as destiny; only choices exist." From: Moongarden's "Solaris."
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