When Ice and Mountains Sound Alike

Just as English has “sun” and “son,” “rain” and “rein,” “soul” and “sole,” and many more examples of chance homophony in the language, that is, words which sound alike but which have unrelated etymological histories, Miami-Illinois also has various sets of homophones. 

One set of Miami-Illinois homophones contains one term that means “freeze, ice” and the other that signifies “mountain, big hill”; both are -aten. This term does not stand alone; it occurs only in composite words. In Old Illinois, the independent nouns for “ice” was tahkwanwi, literally ‘it is cold’, as well as aašoohkooni, an old and modern word for “ice”. The independent noun for ‘mountain, hill’ in the language, old and modern, is ačiwi.  (š is the sound written “sh” in English and “ch” in French; č is the sound written “(t)ch” in English and “tch” in French.)

This particular homophonous situation involving terms meaning “freeze, ice” and “hill, mountain” is not uncommon in Algonquian. It is also seen for example in Ojibwe, where we find kepatin ‘it freezes over’ and kipapakatin ‘it is frozen thick’, but kiiškatinaa ‘it is a steep hill’  and tawatinaa ‘there is a dip between hills’.

The following are a couple of examples of -aten meaning “freeze, ice” in Illinois where -aten is a inanimate intransitive verb final:

siipiiwi soonkatenwi  ‘the river freezes’

nipihsi kipwatenki  ‘the lake freezes solid’

Other examples from the French Jesuit dictionaries:

<<  Cakiten8i  glace arretee qui ne peut passer  >> [Fr. stopped ice that doesn’t flow for kahkitenwi ‘(it is) stuck ice’.

<<  8acamaten8i glace belle, luisante, transparente  >> [Fr. beautiful, shiny, transparent ice] for waahkatenwi  ‘(it is) clear ice’

<<  arang8eten8i  glace blanche par petits endroits  >> [Fr. little patches of white ice here and there]  for  araankweetenwi  literally ‘rainbow ice’

<<  g8naten8i  glace couverte de neige  >> [Fr. Ice covered with snow] for koonatenwi ‘(it is) snow ice’

<<  nipiscaten8i  glace mouille  >> [Fr. wet ice] for nipihkatenwi  ‘(it is) water ice’

(Note that -aten, whether it means “freeze, ice” or “mountain, hill,” adapts its phonological shape to surrounding sounds, so that it is pronounced [-aten], [-eten] or even [-iten] sometimes.)

<< Espaten8i ~ patenwi >> is a common word for “mountain, hill” in Old Illinois.   Le Boullenger’s translation is hauteur (Fr. a height, an eminence). Literally, the Illinois term, which is phonemic espatenwi  is composed of  esp- ‘up, above’ and -aten ‘hill’, along with what is at heart a third-person singular inanimate intransitive independent verb suffix -wi.

Note that << Espaten8i  >> and << paten8i  >> are the same word. The initial vowel, in this case e-, when it precedes a pre-aspirated consonant, here written sp, was disappearing from the language in the late 1600s. Consequently, some speakers said espatenwi while others said patenwi for short. pahpatinwi ‘it is mountainous’ is a related inanimate intransitive verb recorded from a Wea speaker by Albert Gatschet in the late 1800s. Here we see the same verb as above but with first-syllable reduplication, giving the form  pahpa-, which has the sense of repeating hills, hence the translation: “it is mountainous”.

Two more examples of -aten meaning ‘mountain, hill’ are

<<  Pimitaten8i  >>, which Le Boullenger defines as colline qui regarde vers ici (Fr. a hill that faces this way), is phonemic pimitatenwi. This term literally means ‘(it is) a cross-hill’ (cross as in perpendicular).

<<  Ch8catinwi   colline penchant  >> (Fr. inclining hill) for šookatenwi  ‘(it is) a sliding-hill’

Finally, there was once a large natural hill along the Des Plaines River known to Miami-Illinois-speaking peoples as mihsooratenwi ‘(it is) a dugout canoe hill’. This toponym was recorded in Miami-Illinois with the spelling << Missouratenouy >> and its referent described by Pierre-Charles Delliette in his memoir of the Illinois Country known as the “De Gannes Memoir”. The hill, which had the appearance of a large dugout canoe, was located at some difficult rapids in the Des Plaines River at present Joliet, Illinois. The hill is indicated on the map that Louis Jolliet had Jean-Baptiste Louis Franquelin make after the latter’s return to Quebec from the Mississippi voyage of discovery with Jacques Marquette. On that map it is called “Mont Joliet”.

Michael McCafferty

©2015