In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

3 [76] Indian Words (from Louisiana French by William A.Read,1931) Historical—At the close of the seventeenth century, the early French colonists found the Lower Mississippi Valley and the adjacent territory in the possession of numerous Indian tribes,who are classified as members of four great linguistic families, the Caddoan, the Muskhogean, the Siouan, and the Tunican. Beginning slightly west of Pearl River and extending eastward through what is now Middle and Southern Mississippi, and reaching a line at some distance beyond the Tombigbee River, was the territory of the powerful Choctaw nation.The French soon entered into fairly intimate relations with the Choctaws, who at that time numbered about 15,000 souls, and who during the latter part of the eighteenth century drifted in bands, more or less numerous, across into Louisiana. From the Choctaw language the French borrowed more words directly than from any other Indian source, a fact that may be ascribed partly to the numerical superiority of the Choctaws over other Southern tribes, and partly to the close kinship of Choctaw with the Mobilian dialect.The Mobilienne, thus named by the French after Mobile, the great trading post of the Colonial Period, served as a medium of communication for all the tribes of the Lower Mississippi Valley,1 and extended its influence as far north even as the mouth of the Ohio. It was as important to the Indians and white traders of the Colonial Period as French is today to the diplomatic [77] circles of Europe.To British traders it became known as the Chickasaw trade jargon, because of the close resemblance between the Chickasaw and the Choctaw or Mobilian vocabulary. Now the Mobilian is based chiefly on Choctaw, and contains indeed so much of the Choctaw vocabulary that this circumstance proved Indian Words (from Louisiana French, 1931) 93 to be decisive in rendering the influence of Choctaw greater on the French language than that of any other Indian dialect. A few Choctaws still live in St. Tammany Parish, and four Choctaw families occupy the Whatley farms near Jena, in La Salle Parish. More than a thousand Choctaws are in Mississippi. In 1925 the Choctaw Nation in Oklahoma was estimated at 26,828. It should be borne in mind, furthermore, that the Mobilian was enriched by loans from the dialects of Algonquian tribes who inhabited the region lying to the north of the Southern Indian territory. Besides the Choctaw or Mobilian element there is another class of sig5 . Map of linguistic stocks of American Indians 94 Chapter 3 nificant Indian loans in Louisiana-French.These are the words, either Algonquian or Iroquoian in origin, which were brought to Louisiana by Acadians and Canadians, by missionaries, voyageurs, and coureurs de bois. The territory of the Algonquians formerly comprised almost all of Canada east of the one hundred and fifteenth meridian and south of Hudson’s Bay, as well as that part of the United States lying east of the Mississippi and north of Tennessee and Virginia. In 1907 there were about 90,000 Algonquians , a majority of whom are now distributed at various points throughout Canada. At the coming of the white men the Algonquian territory surrounded that of the Iroquois, another extensive linguistic family, whose northern tribes once occupied the region extending from the shores of the St. Lawrence, Lakes Huron, Ontario, and Erie as far south as the present state of Maryland. The present population of the Iroquois is estimated at 16,000 or 17,000 souls, of whom two thirds are settled at various places in the provinces of Quebec and Ontario. It is important to remember, in the next place, that the French first used the name Acadie to distinguish the east[78]ern part of New France from the western, which began with the St. Lawrence Valley and was called Canada. The ancient province of Acadia comprises approximately parts of Maine and the province of Quebec, as well as the provinces of New Brunswick , Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island. When a settlement was effected in 1605 at Port Royal, now Annapolis, in Nova Scotia, by the Sieur de Monts, Champlain, and other noted Frenchmen, all this region formed the hunting grounds of Algonquian tribes known as the Abnakis,the Micmacs , and the Malecites. Survivors of these tribes still inhabit parts of the Ancient Acadia. Indian words, therefore, which survive in the Acadian dialect are likely to be of Algonquian origin; whereas those met with in the dialect of...

Share