Language Log and a dumb “coyote”
A highly reputable linguistics blog made a boo-boo by quoting someone else…
Language Log has a new, fun post titled “Coyote Warning“. It’s worth your clicking to go read the entire thing.
Image credit: Amazon
The only reason for my comment today is that that piece quotes Wiktionary about the etymology of the word “coyote”.
Like a lot of New World words ending in -te, “coyote” definitely comes from a Uto-Aztecan language such as Nahuatl; this is mentioned in the Wiktionary article.
But the Wiktionary etymology that’s repeated at Language Log goes on in a way that’s bound to make our Chinooker ears prick up:
Compare Chinook ki-o-tī.
This would seem to be trying to imply that “coyote” can be ultimately traced back to a Chinookan or Chinook Jargon source.
Yikes!
Chinookan?
This can’t be a Chinookan-language noun, as it lacks any noun-class prefix, such as u- ‘Feminine’ or i- ‘Masculine’.
Chinook Jargon?
So, what if ki-o-tī is meant to show us a Chinook Jargon word instead?
Well, that would be dumb.
The word “coyote” is known to have been in use in Mexican Spanish for centuries before CJ existed. So CJ isn’t a candidate for being the source of “coyote”.
Did I say yet that “coyote” isn’t even documented in Chinuk Wawa until quite late, from the 1890s onward? The same animal, in our source documents on the CW world, was previously called by a vast array of terms (such as “prairie wolf”), because it was unfamiliar to Settler newcomers — and it was economically unimportant during the fur trade that dominated earlier CW times.
And “coyote” is just obviously an English-language pronunciation of the Mexican Spanish borrowing from Nahuatl.
Not to mention that this “ki-o-tī“, whatever phonetics it’s meant to vaguely suggest, isn’t an accurate rendering of anyone’s pronunciation!
Bonus fact:
The group discussion in the Comments to the Language Log post, last I looked, seems unaware of how Coyote is a culture hero who created things the way they are by both cleverness and dumbness.
At least that’s my own recurring impression from the Pacific Northwest stories of Coyote that I’ve heard elders tell.
He seems to reliably screw up about 50% of the time!
