I saw a mention of a Boris Vian novel called Trouble dans les andains and was troubled by the fact that I had no idea what andains were. Wikipedia gave me an idea, with illustrations, and when I went to the English article I discovered that they were windrows. Ah (said I), now I not only know what andains are but I have a clearer idea of what windrows are! The OED (entry revised 2024) defines windrow thus:
1.a. A long line into which mown grass, hay, barley, etc., is raked before being gathered into heaps or cocks (cock n.³); a row of sheaves of corn, heaps of turf or peat, etc., set up to be dried by exposure to the wind. Also in extended use: a pile of dead branches, vegetation, etc., gathered to be burnt.
?1523 On the next day turne it agayne towarde night and make it in windrowes and than in small hey cockes.
J. Fitzherbert, The Book of Husbandry f. xv
[…]2. Originally and chiefly North American.
2.a. A long line or elongated pile of something, formed by the wind, resulting from other natural processes, or gathered together by human intervention; spec. (a) a row or pile of trees blown down by the wind (cf. windfall n. A.1a); (b) a long pile of leaves, dust, etc., heaped up by, or as if by, the wind.
1829 Here and there a wind-row, along which trees had been uprooted, by the furious blasts that sometimes sweep off acres of our trees in a minute.
J. F. Cooper, Wept of Wish Ton-Wish vol. I. ii. 28
[…]2.b. A long ridge of earth, gravel, etc., displaced by a grader or similar machine; esp. (chiefly Canadian) a ridge of snow heaped along the side of a road by a snowplough.
1907 The cross-town trolley-cars glided along between the windrows of the snow the big plow had whirled from the tracks.
Evening Mail (Halifax, Nova Scotia) 2 November 7/4
[…]
The etymology is boring (wind + row), but to make up for that the French one (from the above-linked Wikipedia article) is unexpected:
Latin ambitanus de ambire : aller des deux côtés (mouvement de la faux) : mesure équivalente à un pas, puis surface de céréale ou de fourrage abattue d’un coup de faux.
The Russian equivalent, валок, is a straightforward derivation from вал ‘rampart, dyke, wall.’
Incidentally, you may think, as I did, that the Fenimore Cooper novel quoted in the 1829 cite has a very odd title, and Wikipedia provides confirmation: “The title puzzled the public and did not satisfy them so it was only used in the United States.” It appears to mean ‘someone who was wept over’; from the novel: “The wept of my household is again with us.” He may have been wildly popular, but a competent wielder of the English language he was not.
For the other half of the title of Cooper’s novel, the internet gave me this 1978 explanation by a scholar with apparent relevant expertise:
“Captain Mark Heathcote, a widower now for more than twenty years, decides (for religious reasons never fully particularized) to leave the Massachusetts Bay Colony and resettle in a fertile valley of the Connecticut Territory, not far from Fort Hartford. The new settlement is called Wish-Ton-Wish, a name which, the author claims, is the Indian term for whippoorwill. [Doubt has been cast on Cooper’s translation of the word, but this disagreement is unimportant here, for the name has no bearing on the action of the novel.]”
Other details suggest that it is the early-to-mid 1660’s when the plot really gets rolling although Cap’t Heathcote may have been in W-T-W for a while by then. (There’s a Mysterious Stranger who appears to be one of the fugitive regicides on the run from the agents of Charles II.)
BTW one notable thing about Connecticut place names is that while there are plenty of indigenous-language-origin hydronyms, such names are very rarely used for human municipalities. Rarely doesn’t mean never, and there are a few where e.g. rivers give their names to a settlement along their banks, but it still makes Cooper’s fictional toponym ring a little false.
Finally, fans of 1820’s fiction should know that the same historical actual/factual fugitive regicide whose somewhat mythologized life was drawn on by Cooper* was likewise reportedly drawn on by Sir W. Scott for at least a passing mention in his _Peveril of the Peak_. The internet says that PotP is Scott’s “longest novel,” which may not be a recommendation.
*This being Wm. Goffe, who for many years was hidden from the authorities by the king’s disloyal subjects in the Massachusetts town that is now Hatticville. Hat may or may not have had occasion to walk up Goffe Street in his New Haven days, but New Haven was in those days less remote from royal authority and viewed as less safe a place to hide long-term so he eventually went inland and further north.
Hat may or may not have had occasion to walk up Goffe Street in his New Haven days
I did indeed. Whalley and Dixwell too.
Not that Cooper has much of a reputation anyway with regard to Indian ethnography, but: wishtonwish is not ‘whippoorwill’ in a language of New England, but a word for ‘prairie dog’, first mentioned by Zebulon Pike in the account of his travels on the western Arkansas river in 1806 (here). I haven’t figured out what language it might be in. I could not find it in dictionaries of Pawnee, Osage, Kansa, Kiowa, or Arapaho. It could well be that Pike had learned the word somewhere else long before, or that it was later replaced. The “-ton-” suggests a nasalized vowel, as in Siouan languages, but I found nothing in the online Comparative Siouan Dictionary.
According to their wikis, New Haven and Middletown both had English settlements using Native American names, and New London was “informally” known that way for more than a decade before being given an English name.
Seems that Cooper at least in that way was being quite true to colonial history.
goffe reminded me that i’d been meaning to remind myself of my tangential family connection (on the goyish side) to one of the regicides who came to new england. it turns out that my forebear’s aunt was one bridget lisle, daughter of the regicide sir john lisle. and it says something about the social regard for at least some of those men that the intervening uncle (the regicide’s son-in-law) was president of harvard.
In 1962 Arno Schmidt (I mentioned him recently) published his translation of the novel under the title Conanchet; oder die Beweinte von Wish=Ton=Wish, together with a long (40 pages) afterword (included in the collected edition of his Essays und Aufsätze). At the time, Cooper was known in Germany as an author of childrens’ books — the Leatherstocking tales, in atrocious translations, abbreviated ad usum Delphini. AS thought The Wept of Wish Ton-Wish was the best choice to reintroduce Cooper as a serious author to German readers.
As a translator, AS found a 19th century translation of Cooper’s works indispensable, despite its shortcomings, “weil Einem gewisse ältliche Wendungen heutzutage einfach nicht mehr beifallen”.
AS quotes Poe writing about Cooper’s “awkwardness”.
Y, are you saying you know the relevant eastern Algonquian terms?
I don’t, but I did try to track them down. The Miami word for whippoorwill is wiihkoowiia with h signifying a glottal fricative. Miqmaq is wigweliej, with j as in college. The Lenape word ends in a sybillant – wekulis. The latter is listed in a modern Lenape dictionary, but it matches a late 19th c. compilation of native whippoorwill words that simplified spelling, and there are other things that make me think the historical word would have been rendered differently. The Mohegan-Pequot seem to have a word makiawis- though online I only find it cited in stories about “Little People” whose name means “whippoorwill moccasins”, and it’s not clear how the word parses.
So without tracking down all the possible dialects, I find consonant sounds at the end of the first and third syllables that might have sounded like sh to Anglo ears. And the opening consonant of the middle syllable varies widely.
Cooper used wishtonwish before the work so titled, in Last of the Mohicans.
Given that the antecedent of Pike’s prairie dog word can’t be found, I would suggest that he may indeed have picked it up as Y hypothesized, “somewhere else long before”, as a colloquial spelling of a native Algonquian whippoorwill word, which he recycled. Cooper’s usage has more evidence than Pike’s.
Re “Wish-Ton-Wish”
https://creeliteracy.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Watkins-Faries.pdf
In this Cree dictionary,
Gopher = Mischanikwuchas
You could create a chain, e.g.,
Mischanikwuchas > *Mishtaniwush > *Mishtaniwish > Wish-Ton-Wish (maybe mediated by French or other speakers without the “ch” phoneme), but it would require a bit of additional support.
One cannot object to rozele’s “on the goyish side” specification, yet maybe it highlights that the beheading of Charles I may be one of the select number of controversial historical events that AFAIK has never been speculatively attributed to a Jewish Conspiracy. But my knowledge of conspiracy-theorizing may no doubt be incomplete or perhaps even now some offshoot of the Thule Society has a research team trying to connect the dots.
Ryan makes a fair point about early indigenous loanword-names being superseded only later in parts of New England. But in the case of the early naming of New Haven, Quinnipiac[k] was an obvious candidate for borrowing because it was either a hydronym or a demonym (well, both, but whether the river was named for the people or vice versa is what’s perhaps less clear). “Let’s randomly name our settlement after the local word for a kind of bird-or-mammal” is a less obvious pathway unless the indigenes had already converted the species-name into a toponym.
Quinnipiac remains a hydronym to this day, also transferred to the name of Quinnipiac University, perhaps now best known for the success of its ice hockey teams (men’s and women’s as of right now both ranked in their respective top 10’s nationally in Division I).
Quinnipiac U is also a pollster, emerging from hibernation every few years like a groundhog…
The title made me think it was about some kind of silly novel where someone might be using an Andains phone and a Windrows computer.
Incidentally, in Dutch if someone doesn’t use their scythe entirely straight but always leaves a bit at the beginning, the remainder is called a comb (kam).
@rozele: Even in Britain, part of the deal worked out to effect the Restoration was that nobody except the regicides themselves were supposed to be punished or politically disabled. Massachusetts was, of course, still under Calvinist control even after the Calvinist-dominated Protectorate ended (and Puritans thus expelled from parish positions in England and Wales by the 1662 Act of Uniformity). So it is perhaps unsurprising that someone like Hoar, the son-in-law of a regicide, could be president of Harvard.
@J. W. Brewer: The perhaps more long running claim to fame of Quinnipiac University is its Polling Institute, which is a major source of political polling.
>Let’s randomly name our settlement after the local word for a kind of bird-or-mammal” is a less obvious pathway
Perhaps, but there are examples, like Kewanee, IL, and Kewaunee, WI, whose wikis, curiously, say they mean prairie chicken in Winnebago (sic, now usually Hochunk) and “an archaic name for a species of duck” in Potawatomi, respectively.
I guess the words in entirely different language families could have arrived at outcomes that sounded the same to settlers, but I do wonder whether something got lost there.
Look, if some of you weirdos care more about political polling than Division I ice hockey, I can’t help you.
Ice hockey was played on a pond in a park here a few days ago. 🙂
I glanced at a few Algonquian dictionaries. Badgers, prairie gophers, squirrels, and prairie dogs seem to overlap and intertwine, which remind me of our recent Muskogean gopher discussion. I still haven’t found a clear candidate for wishtonwish.
My great uncle died after a pickup game of hockey on an inadequately frozen pond. He fell through the ice and suffered some nasty injuries. My grandmother never really got over her brother’s death.
the beheading of Charles I may be one of the select number of controversial historical events that AFAIK has never been speculatively attributed to a Jewish Conspiracy
Cromwell tolerated Jews!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resettlement_of_the_Jews_in_England
Clearly he must have been a pawn of Mossad. And of the Arminians.
And obviously, a man who could say “I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken” must have been some kind of Marxist.
(I’m almost afraid to release this meme into the wild for Grok to suck up, but I strongly suspect that it’s out there already in some form, along with the weather-controlling space lasers.)
Fauna (and aves) seem a relatively unlikely source of toponyms. They move about so much …
I was going to say that I couldn’t think of any Kusaasi placenames based on animals (or birds), but then thought of Widinya’aŋ “Woriyanga”, which means “mare” (though that has probably got something to do with the strong local association of horses with chieftaincy. Nobody seems to know.)
“Accra” is supposed to mean “Anthills”, but (a) anthills don’t move about so much and (b) I suspect that it’s really an Akan folk etymology of a word which is actually a borrowing of the local Gã ethnic group’s autonym (formerly *Grã.)
But Hatters can probably come up with scads of places named for animals or birds.
“Oxford”, I suppose … kinda …
“Isle of Dogs” … though that seems to be uncertain:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isle_of_Dogs#Etymology
“Catford” also seems dubious:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catford#Toponymy
Animalville, Birdia,…
i am typing from just outside what was at one time the community of “crow hill” – but it’s not entirely clear how much the name was actually about birds, and how much it was a racist tag for one of the oldest black communities in what would become brooklyn.
Trifouilly-les-Oies.
Jamaica, Queens, is usually said to be from Munsee amóxkw ‘beaver’ (form taken from Ives Goddard’s own fieldwork), from Proto-Algonquian *ameθkwa. The early attestations of the name of ye bever pond are laid out here in William Wallace Tooker (1911) The Indian Place-Names on Long Island and Islands Adjacent, with Their Probable Significations.
They move about so much…
In this regard, Uruguay, if ‘Snail River’.
“Accra” is supposed to mean “Anthills”, but (a) anthills don’t move about so much and (b) I suspect that it’s really an Akan folk etymology of a word which is actually a borrowing of the local Gã ethnic group’s autonym (formerly *Grã.)
Very interesting! Has there been any further ethnography following up on what is reported here in Carl Christian Reindorf (1895) History of the Gold Coast and Asante, Based on Traditions and Historical Facts?
It reminds me a bit of the Greek myth surrounding the Myrmidons. I wonder if there are other examples of ‘ant-people’ like this.
In California, the Pájaro River, and the adjacent town of Pájaro. A couple of Dogtowns. Los Gatos. Los Osos. Gaviota. Tejón. Tiburon. Alcatraz. Bear Creek and Deer Creek and the Eel River… And those are just places I’ve been to. (Probably passed through Bivalve and Elk.)
Fish in a barrel, as they say (that’s not a place name, AFAIK.)
From Elliot Coues, ed. (1895) The Expeditions of Zebulon Montgomery Pike to Headwaters of the Mississippi River Through Louisiana Territory, and in New Spain, During the Years 1805–6–7, vol. 1, p. 96, when Pike’s expedition was heading north from St. Paul in 1805:
This does not give me confidence that Pike recorded wish-ton-wish very exactly on his 1806 expedition up the Arkansas—if it even is an actual name for the animal, and not just an onomatopoeic rendering of one of the calls that Cynomys ludovicianus makes (Pike: you are saluted on all sides by the cry of Wishtonwish, from which they derive their name with the Indians).
It seems that some people (as here, p. 769) may have assumed the word is Osage because Pike was in the heart of Osage country at the time. Hodge et al. (1912) Handbook, part 2, p. 965 (here) says it is of Caddoan origin. I would really like to know the source of this statement, but unfortunately the editor of that entry does not give it.
As an aside, there is also an early instance of wish-ton-wish in John Dunn Hunter’s 1823 ‘memoir’ here. I suppose Hunter simply lifted this wish-ton-wish from Pike’s 1810 account of his expeditions and then passed it off as his own Indian lore. Are there any early attestions not derived from Pike?
I just want to say that Zebulon Montgomery Pike is an awesome name. 🙂
@ulr: Arnold Schmidt seems to have had a fondness for writers that were dismissed as low-brow by the cultural elites of his day. I remember reading essays by him advocating for Karl May and Jules Verne.
I didn’t see any other primary sources for the word. Some later sources spelled it wistonwish but I think that was just a miscopy.
When Pike wrote it he was in Colorado (and recorded the peak that bears his name), in Arapaho country. There are some poorly recorded divergent Arapahoan languages, but I don’t know that that would help here.
I should look at Caddoan languages other than Pawnee.
In California, the Pájaro River
Pronounced, by Anglos, pa-DJAIR-oh.
As a matter of fact it’s not the “Pájaro River” but the Pajaro River. If you want to refer to it in Spanish, it’s the Río del Pájaro, but that’s Spanish, not English. In any case, your “pa-DJAIR-oh” is not the normative pronunciation; Gudde, who is careful about these things, has (pä′ hə rō).
KQED, here, from 2024, confirms the pronunciation and the accentlessness.
Tejon is unaccented too.
Hans and I touching briefly on the essays for radio by AS, previously: Bottom’s dream
When Pike wrote it he was in Colorado (and recorded the peak that bears his name), in Arapaho country.
By it, is the word wish-ton-wish meant?
To go by the identification of places in Stephen Harding Hart and Archer Butler Hulbert, eds., The Southwestern Journals of Zebulon Pike, 1806-1807… In September 1806, Pike’s party (which included some Osage) had gone off north from the Arkansas River, and they visited a very large Pawnee village somewhere in the vicinity of the Republican River, as far as I can gather. Pike was received hospitably there along with the Osage members of his party. Pike’s party also interacted peaceably with some Kansa in September. At the time of the entry in which the word wish-ton-wish occurs, Pike’s party had gone south to rejoin the Arkansas River and were somewhere upstream from Great Bend in central Kansas, if I understand correctly. At the beginning of October, it seems Pike’s party included Bel Oiseau (apparently a chief or otherwise important person among the Osage), two other Osage men, and one Osage woman, although Bel Oiseau and one other Osage left when the party went started going too far west for their comfort in the middle of October. The mention of wish-ton-wishes is at the entry for 24 October:
Then, for the entry for 29 October, Hart and Butler have this note on Pike’s movements:
This is all in what is now central Kansas. Continuing west up the Arkansas, Pike’s party doesn’t seem to meet anyone else for a long time, although they find traces of camps that Pike ascribes to ‘Tetuas’ (Comanche, I gather) as well as traces left by Spanish military movements, and they espy a man from afar. Then in late November, Pike has a tense meeting with a Pawnee war party returning from a failed expedition against the Tetuas. And then in what is now Colorado, I think, Pike’s party finds the traces of a large camp which Pike ascribes to Tetuas but encounters no one else until they meet some Spaniards in February.
I couldn’t find anything more in Pike’s narrative about the Osage woman who accompanied his party. It seems like she would have gone back too as they got deeper into Comanche territory, food got scarcer, and winter set in with a vengeance. Climb that high mountain way over there in winter? Yeah, no.
I see your Oxford and raise you Schweinfurt. Etymology allegedly unclear, but no alternative to the obvious is given or cited or suggests itself.
Are windrows semantically related to cornrows?
A snow windrow in Norwegian is either a fonn f. (pl. fonner or (Nyn.) fenner) or a drive f. The former is more stationary and can also be manmade while the latter is moving about with the changing wind, but the meanings overlap and the usage probably varies with dialect and speaker.
Hay windrows isn’t really a thing. The newly cut grass would be carefully heaped onto hesjer “hayracks” for drying.
In California, the Pájaro River, and the adjacent town of Pájaro. A couple of Dogtowns. Los Gatos. Los Osos. Gaviota. Tejón. Tiburon. Alcatraz. Bear Creek and Deer Creek and the Eel River… And those are just places I’ve been to. (Probably passed through Bivalve and Elk.)
Gavilan? Point Lobos (apparently named for sea lions)?
“Bivalve” brings us to Oyster Bay and Muscle Shoals (possibly named for mussels).
The Galapagos Islands count, and strangely enough, so do the Canary Islands.
The biggest one in the U.S. must be Buffalo.
The only ones I can think of in New Mexico are Spanish (but I don’t know the meanings of most of the Indigenous names). Coyote, Raton, Borrego Mesa, Gallina and the Gallinas River (referring to Wild Turkeys, according to Robert Julyan in The Place Names of New Mexico), Las Nutrias (beavers, not otters, according to Julyan again), Las Tusas and the Tusas Mountains (gophers and prairie dogs). OK, one in English is Eagle Nest.
Xerîb, yes, sorry, by “it” I meant the entry with “wishtonwish”. Unclear anaphoras are a bad habit of mine.
About the location, you’re right, as usual. I somehow had located the journey back south from Pawnee and the split-up of the party much further to the west.
The Handbook of North American Indians is typically very exhaustive with regards to ethnonyms and how they were recorded. That is true here as well (vol. 13-2 [Plains], p. 903). The name “Tetaus”, for the Comanche, seems to be a mistranscription of Ietans, part of a large family of names, of unknown origin: Laitans, Heitans, Ayetans, etc., etc.
Zoonymic toponyms in Norway are beyond count, but it’s difficult to sort out both animal names used as personal names (Bjørn), real animal names obscured by language change, and recent(ish) folk etymologies. Some may be as old as settlement itself, others are recent and ephemeric. Some got their name because of the local wildlife (Bjordalen “Beaver Valley”, though perhaps by way of the river), other because a feature of the landscape was likened to an animal (Lofoten “the lynx foot”), but often it’s difficult to tell (Reinsnosa “the reindeer snout” by likening, or nos “roundish mountain” by likening and “reindeer” for its typical wildlife). There are clearings in the forest named Tiurleiken “the capercaille play(ground)” all over the place. An other set is named for their use in animal husbandry. Kjeøya “Goatkid Island”, Merrabakken “Mare Hill”, Øksnevad “Oxford”.
(All etymologies from memory. Handle with care.)
Add: “Naitanes” is recorded, too. Perhaps related to Kitsai nánita?
Reminds me of Dakota/Lakota/Nakota.
Tiurleiken “the capercaille play(ground)”
Zoological English has adopted “lek” from Swedish for places where animals gather for courtship displays.
The Wikiparticle says, “There is also evidence from scrape marks left by dinosaurs that suggest they also indulged in leks.[33][34][35]” David M.?
I missed the paper (ref. 34); the introduction is not paywalled and seems convincing enough so far.
(Keep in mind that Ostendichnus is the name of the trace, not the tracemaker; the tracemaker is unknown, and traces don’t line up 1 : 1 with tracemakers anyway, which is why they get completely separate names.)
Tying it all up with the topic of ice hockey, I lesrn that Leksand, Sweden was named for the lek of the common whitefish (Coregonus lavaretus) in the shallow water by the sand.
Swedish lek is supposed to be cognate with Northern England lake ‘to play’; I thought I’d learned that here, but can’t find it.
Systematically, Sc./NEng. laik, SEng. loak, I suppose. Apply asterisks as needed.
California placenames based on animal or bird names in native languages are rare. The Chuckwalla Mountains is the only certain and not obscure one I could find.
Digging through Gudde and Bright yielded the following, though:
Nah, it’s from the Kusaal Tʋ’ʋmini ya ma! “Insult (ye) your mother!”
The Kusaasi contribution to the population of California has been curiously neglected in the literature.
My apologies: I now remember (from 1969, so it took a while) that paDJAIRoh is, or was, a street in Salinas (sa-LEEN-us, to be disinguished from Salina (sa-LINE-uh), Kansas).
Ah, all is now clear!
Rodger C: Amazing. Salinas is 20 miles away from Pajaro, and Spanish has been either a major or a dominant language in both since their beginnings.
Owing to the roughness of the path they gave vent to their disgust by numerous Chinese imprecations. Gradually the most prominent settled itself on to the trail and it became known as ‘Tunemah!’
Thanks for this, Y! It made my day. A fuller version can be found in Lilbourne Alsip Winchell (1933) History of Fresno County and the San Joaquin Valley: Narrative and Biographical, top of p. 159 (available here):
Winchell was born in 1855 and so it is possible that he knew Peck and Nye personally. In any case, muck-a-hai sounds like Taishanese 媽嘅閪 ma⁵⁵ gɛ³³ hai³³ ‘(your) mother’s cunt’ (Chao tone numerals for notating Taishanese). And Yeu-nicky-shee-fut! sounds like Taishanese 屌偌嘅屎窟 iu⁵⁵ niak²¹ gɛ³³ si⁵⁵fut⁵⁵ ‘Fuck y’all’s asshole’. If the -nick- is 偌 (also written 逽, 聶 ) niak²¹ ‘you’ (specifically plural as opposed to singular 你 ni³³), then that would be diagnostic of Taishanese here, as opposed to Cantonese, I believe.
I am not sure what the -ne in Teu-na-mah-ne! would be. But the Teu-na-mah- would be 屌那媽 in Cantonese. (Maybe the -ne is 呢 in 屌那媽呢 with 呢 as a sort of emphatic particle, ‘yeah?’, ‘see?’, ‘ya hear?’. Is it is just 你 (Taishanese ni³³) ‘you’?) Or did Winchell not get the form quite right? He reports the other two expletives rather accurately, though, if I am interpreting them correctly. I’m probably just blanking on something really obvious here.
The thing that really puzzles me though is the t- of the transcription Teu-ne-mah-ne. The Taishanese pronunciation of 屌 ‘fuck’ is iu⁵⁵, while the Cantonese pronunciation is diu2 with initial /t/. Taishanese iu⁵⁵ shows the expected loss of earlier Yue d- /t/ (cf. 店 ‘shop’, Taishanese iam³³ but Cantonese dim3; 大 ‘big, great’, Taishanese ai³² but Cantonese daai6, etc.). As I wrote above, I thought that 屌 iu⁵⁵ might be what we see in Yeu-nicky-shee-fut!. Why the t- of Cantonese then in Tunemah? I would have expected the Chinese shepherds to have spoken in Taishanese. And I also would have expected great Taishanese consonant chain shift (of which one component is original t /tʰ/ > /h/ and original d /t/ > ∅) to have been complete, or mostly complete, before the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 stopped Chinese immigration to the United States. But I am not sure about this. Maybe the two men spoke different Yue varieties? Or it is a loan from Cantonese or another Yue variety where d- was maintained, like Spanish joder (with /x/ from Latin f), instead of expected *hoder? Or maybe Winchell was just cobbling together expletives that he could collect from Chinese people he knew, many years after the fact, for the sake of a vivid narrative? I don’t have spare time at the moment to look into this question of Teu-ne-mah-ne any further. I hope other LH readers can follow up.
Fascinating, thanks for that!
Y: I was told this (my class was) by a DLI Spanish instructor born in Cuba. I assume she heard it from some Anglo(s) and it stuck with her.
Salina (sa-LINE-uh), Kansas)
home, as of ten or fifteen years ago when i passed through, to some very good barbecue!
“Teu-na-mah-ne! muck-a-hai! Yeu-nicky-shee-fut!
i’m impressed that the transcription is solid enough to allow Xerîb’s fascinating and detailed interpretation!
Thank you, Xerîb!
(I know nothing of Chinese phonology. I’m winging it.) Bright’s Cantonese informant’s interpretation of “Tunemah” is (Jyutping) diu² nei⁵ aa³ maa¹, that is, I think, 屌你阿妈 (= traditional 屌儞阿媽; 屌 is also written in Hong Kong as the iconic 𨳒) or contracted to diu² naa³ maa¹ ~ diu² naa⁵ maa¹ 屌那妈. Neither aa nor naa fit well in “Tunemah”. Is 阿妈 ‘mother’ in Cantonese vs. just 妈 in Taishanese? Then the Taishanese will come out as /tiːu̯⁵⁵ niː³³ maː⁵⁵/ (I think), which fits “Tunemah” well. That strengthens the Taishanese interpretation but leaves the initial stop puzzling, as Xerîb points out. Could the initial /j/ have some frication which would explain it?
It’s unusual having two apparently independent sources for the story, with separate recordings of that one phrase.
P.S. Gremke doesn’t provide any sources in her article. Another account says, “The name is, as the ingenuous reader is presumed not to know, a Chinese ‘cuss-word’ of very vivacious connotation.”
Best for last: Sex educator Susie Bright interviewing her dad, linguist and onomastician Bill Bright, on taboo American placenames (including more detail on the Tunemah story), here. It’s 50 minutes and I haven’t listened to it yet. The bit in that webpage suggests to me that “fuck your mother” was specifically aimed at the laborers’ boss, not just expressing crankiness.
There’s a whole book on South African animal-based toponyms: Lucie Möller’s Of the same breath: Indigenous animal and place names, here.
How could we have forgotten Italy !
Oscan Vitelliú ‘Italia’ here on the legend of a coin used by the allied Italian states opposing Rome in the Social War, depicting a wolf (Rome) being gored by a bull (the other Italian states allied against Rome); cf. Umbrian uitlu- ‘calf’; Latin vitulus.
To back up quite a ways, my initial skepticism was not with the broad concept of deriving toponyms from animals but more with the notion that you would borrow a *foreign* language’s opaque word for a particular animal and use that for a toponym. As distinct from borrowing a pre-existing toponym of opaque etymology which turned out to be animal-based. Does Cooper actually offer a story about how/why the incoming Anglophones chose Wish-ton-wish as the name of their settlement?
From the first comment by JWB:
>The new settlement is called Wish-Ton-Wish, a name which, the author claims, is the Indian term for whippoorwill. [Doubt has been cast on Cooper’s translation of the word…]
I’m going to cast doubt on the premise of much of our discussion. Here is the actual passage:
>Wish-ton-Wish, as, in commemoration of the first bird that had been seen by the immigrants, the valley of the Heathcotes was called.
Cooper doesn’t actually attribute anything to the Indians here.
(What’s truly insane here is the idea that a whippoorwill was the first bird someone saw, anywhere. Nobody “sees” whippoorwills. They are only active at night, and even then they hunt by perching low and waiting for flying insects to be backlit against the sky. By day they are cryptic and remain still to avoid detection. You would only see one when it moved to avoid being stepped on. The ratio of calls to sightings has to be 10,000 to 1.)
In Last of the Mohicans, Hawkeye mentions the whistle of the whippoorwill as a possible signal. When David recognizes and describes the call, Hawkeye says “he speaks of the wish-ton-wish.” It’s not really clear why he says this. Hawkeye, not David, first spoke of the bird, so if wish-ton-wish refers to the bird, you’d expect him to say “we speak”. There are a couple Mohicans present, but they’ve attentively followed David’s narrative in English for quite a while. It seems as plausible that Hawkeye is giving a name to the whistle, the way one might say to some sturdy indoorsman unfamiliar with the cries of crows, “he speaks of the caw.” Though that too would be odd since “whippoorwill” is already onomatopoeic.
Bottom line, Cooper never actually says that the word is native.
In light of Ryan’s helpful investigation of the underlying texts, I’ll make a note to myself to be more skeptical going forward about the reliability of [internet explanations said to be faithfully copied from] Warren S. Walker, Plots and Characters in the Fiction of James Fenimore Cooper (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1978).
Lovecraft on the unseen whippoorwills in “The Dunwich Horror“:
If you are wondering about hop yard if means just what you might expect. The OED gives it as a synonym of hop-garden: a field or piece of land devoted to the cultivation of hops. I’ve doubt I have ever encountered it in literal use, but then I’ve never been significantly involved in agriculture or brewing. There are a smattering of brew pubs across the country called “The Hop Yard”; there is also this store that sells brewing supplies, which I have wondered into once or twice while waiting to meet friends at the restaurant across the hall.
Are whippoorwills chattering in the distance comparable to dogs barking?
Much, much worse. And they (the Dunwich kind, Antrostomus vociferus fictionalis) don’t chatter, they chitter, which as an sf reader you know is much, much, much worse.
Speaking of not this but that, I’d say bullfrogs don’t pipe, they intone “jug o’ rum” way down on the bass clef. Is a bassoon a pipe in the sense of describing an animal’s sound as “piping”?
@Brett: You said what “hop-yard” means, but say for what they were meant, and why Burton was built on Trent.
@Jerry Friedman: I’m not sure if I ever made it all the way through A Shropshire Lad. If I did, most of the poems were relatively unmemorable for me. That one (the second to last, it appears) did, however, seem somewhat familiar. If I had indeed read it before, I would have drawn the inference that Burton upon Trent was a major center of brewing, but that titbit of English cultural geography did not stick with me—so I only rediscovered it upon rereading to poem just now.
Easily the most memorable poem from A Shropshire Lad for me is the wonderfully grim
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/A_Shropshire_Lad/The_Immortal_Part
>Are whippoorwills chattering in the distance comparable to dogs barking?
This is the closing paragraph of Faulkner’s Barn Burning, which is something I often think of when thinking of whippoorwills. That and hearing them from the tent at night when we went camping in my youth.
>He could tell that from the whippoorwills. They were everywhere now among the dark trees below him, constant and inflectioned and ceaseless, so that, as the instant for giving over to the clay birds drew nearer and nearer, there was no interval at all between them. He got up. He was a little stiff, but walking would cure that too as it would the cold, and soon there would be the sun. He went on down the hill, toward the dark woods within which the liquid silver voices of the birds called unceasing–the rapid and urgent beating of the urgent and quiring heart of the late spring night. He did not look back.
Not just the first two lines. The repetitive “whip-poor-will, whip-poor-will” is itself the rapid and urgent beating of the urgent, quiring heart. At least for Faulkner, it’s a bit more than a distant dog barking.
On a factual question, they do not really chatter or chitter, as so many birds do. Cooper is closer in calling it a whistle, Faulkner much better with “liquid silver voices”.
<much, much worse
Taste is a matter of taste, of course. Some may prefer the rumble of the neighbor's air conditioner. (But I think you were mostly reacting to the Lovecraftian usage, rather than to real whippoorwill calls, Jerry?)
And then there's the middle verse of this wonderful song.:
I miss whippoorwill calls. I’ve actually looked them up in iNaturalist in the last month to see where I might bring my kids camping in the late spring, knowing that it likely won’t happen and I may have heard my last whippoorwill 45 years ago.
In the climactic scene of the Kusaasi story about the foolish man who didn’t listen to his wife’s advice about the threat from his witch* neighbour (being a witch herself, she knew what she was talking about), the witches who arrive by night to consume the man’s life force are said to fly tii tii and (subsequently) zig zig. Sadly, I have no other examples of these particular ideophones, but I dare say “chittering” would do fine as a translation …
* Sɔɛn, translated “witch” in local English, but really more like our notion of vampires than witches.
why was Burton built on Trent
By morphic resonance, a clue from today’s Independent crossword:
Order two pints in the end: Burton Ale (5,5)
Oh, damn. Hat, if you would be so kind, could you add a question mark after the word “watch” in my YouTube link above. Or I’ll just link it here.
@Brett: I may be fortunate that I’ve read a number of Housman’s poems in anthologies, but I’ve never tried to get through any of his books. “Terence, this is stupid stuff”, also known as “Epilogue”, is one of his most famous and often quoted poems if I’m not mistaken, so the reason it seemed familiar might have been that you’ve seen quotations from it, such as “And malt does more than Milton can / To justify God’s ways to man.”
@Ryan: Yes, I even meant it to be taken literally: since as you say whippoorwills don’t chitter, their chittering occurs only in Lovecraft, so it’s easily worse than literary dogs barking.
(By the way, eBird is probably more comprehensive for birds than iNaturalist, though for something as obvious as whippoorwill calls, there may be little difference. I don’t know why you don’t think you and your kids will get to hear them unless it’s that the birds are much rarer now, but according to eBird the Eastern Whip-poor-will is still around in much of the eastern U.S., and in case the problem is timing, I’ll mention that there are reports with recordings into the first week of July. You need a login to use the “Species Maps” tab, which gives you options such as month and year. (Incidentally I started this parenthesis with “By the way” only to avoid starting a sentence with “eBird” or “iNaturalist”.))
As I understand it, the way to see whipporwills, aside from happening to scare one up, is to drive back roads at night and look for the eyeshine of one sitting in the road. The Mexican Spanish word for them and Chuck-will’s-widows is tapacaminos ‘roadblocker’. But it’s probably best to have another reason to be driving on those roads.
Or I’ll just link it here.
Yay, the Be Good Tanyas!
That song came on during soccer carpool last night:
Daughter: oh god I hate this sing my dad plays it all the time (semi-true)
Daughter’s friend after a verse: I love this. What is it? I want to put it on my spotify.
Daughter: (buries head in hands)
Jerry the big issues are that there aren’t many good whippoorwill habitats within an hour of my location in the midst if the Chicago megalopolis, one kid isn’t fond of camping (or The Be Good Tonyas – I’m failing as a father) and soccer gets in the way of the seasonally appropriate weekends.
And despite doing a bit of camping, I really haven’t heard them in decades, so it seems without intentionally finding the time it may not happen.
I have however been participating in a project monitoring the whippoorwills’ cousins the nighthawks. Like whippoorwills they’re much less prevalent than in my childhood and early adulthood. I visit four sites once a week for three weeks. I’ve heard a nighthawk at least once each summer, three times two years ago.
The whippoorwill is a nightjar, but not the kind of nightjar that makes a Hypnotic Churr.
The claim that Wish-Ton-Wish was an Indian word comes from Susan Fenimore Cooper, who wrote introductions to 25 of her father’s novels in Pages and Pictures from the Writings of James Fenimore Cooper (1861):
There are a few other 19th-century references to a wishtonwish as a bird, but they’re all later than Cooper and might have picked it up from him.
Given the nature of the group’s sound and persona, one probably can’t cromulently speak of “the hypnotic churr of the Be Good Tanyas.” It seems like there ought to be some other Vancouver-origin musical ensemble that such a phrase would fit better. “The hypnotic churr of the Pink Mountaintops”?
Or I’ll just link it here.
Very sweet, and some bonus Floyd at the end.
The OED actually entered this as a sense of wept, adj. in 1926, with two quotations, one of which is this book. I expect this will be “Obsolete. rare.” when it’s revised.
some bonus Floyd at the end.
Ooh! thank you. Some very drug-crazed variations with the rhythm
I think the last word of “Jugband Blues” may hold an important clue to the interpretation.
That song in turn alludes to a song sung by Patti Page and by Dean Martin and by Elvis Presley, which in turn may allude to Catullus 5.
@Ryan: Soccer? One hour? You just have to explain to your kids about priorities.
Seriously, you never know what’s going to happen (hard-won wisdom you may already have shared with your kids), but if you want to hear whippoorwills again, I think you might well manage it, maybe not in the near term.
And good for you on the nighthawk monitoring! They were an inescapable part of summer when I was growing up in suburban Cleveland and in grad school in Urbana. Sad to hear that they too are getting rare.