And then there are Dogs.

In the previous post, I should have mentioned that young warriors--the boys the French always called "la jeunesse" ("the youth")--were known in Miami-Illinois as aremooki 'dogs'. This term is evinced in Pinet's dictionary's entry << jeunes guerriers arem8ki >>. They appear to have been daunting adversaries.

Dogs

All three dictionaries of the language of the Miami and Illinois peoples created in situ by Jesuit missionaries in the late 1600s and early 1700s exhibit ethnologically interesting items.

From the late 1690s Pierre-François Pinet’s French-Illinois dictionary gives not only the word for the Indians’ dog, which was aremwa, but also a term for the dogs brought to the Illinois Country from France. 

Pinet’s dictionary entry begins with chien francois qui a les oreilles --baisses (sic)-- courbees (French dog, which has lowered curved ears), where his baisses meaning “lowered” is scratched out and replaced by courbees meaning “curved,” as he realized that baisses was an ambiguous, misleading term. What is curious and touching about Pinet’s entry is that right above this entry he added a small figure in the form of a superscripted U to show the shape of the ear that he was talking about. It seems that he probably not that satisfied with the “curved” notion, either.

Pinet wrote the Illinois term for the French dog in the form         
 << papakichia >>. His 17^th -century French spelling representing phonemic papakihšia, where the initial morpheme papak-  means “flat,” is derived from the verb “lie flat,” peepakihšin-. French dogs had floppy ears. The Indians’ dogs of course had ears that pointed up like wolves.

Jean Le Boullenger gives the same spelling for the Illinois word for the French dog in his own dictionary while providing a better term than “curved” to describe the dog’s ears. He wrote  chien franc. qui a les oreilles pendantes, meaning “French dog whose ears hang down”. 

Occasionally, one comes across real gems in these old Miami-Illinois language dictionaries, and here is another today. It’s the expression recorded by Le Boullenger from the Michigamea and/or the Kaskaskia for calling dogs. Le Boullenger wrote << cri pour appeler les ch(iens)  pic88 pic88 >>.

Now, the symbol 8 was a short hand and unequivocal way for writing French ou. However, the occurrence of two of these symbols appearing together at the end of words as in << pic88 >> is extremely rare. The intended phonetic form of the term is most probably [piikoo-piikoo], with natural elongation of the imperative suffix -o. The exclamation is likely a simplified, canine-adapted form of pyaako ‘Come!’, the plural command form of the verb.

Michael McCafferty

© 2015