Louisiana Place Names of Indian Origin, A Collection of Words (review)

To anyone native to Louisiana or the greater Gulf South the words Abita, Houma, Manchac, Plaquemines, and Tchefuncta signify familiar, if a little difficult to pronounce, place names. Yet few could correctly identify their meaning to be “fountain,” “red,” “back entrance,” “persimmon,” and “chinquapin,” respectively. Even fewer, if any, could provide an accurate etymology of those toponyms through Louisiana’s history. Fortunately, William A. Read’s Louisiana Place Names of Indian Origin, A Collection of Words has been republished in an elegant paperback by the University of Alabama Press. Besides providing the ammunition for the reader to wax authoritatively on the meaning of a particular place name, the excavation of Read’s scholarship from recent obscurity by retired physician George M. Riser brings to light the vivid palimpsest that is Louisiana’s toponymic landscape.

This compendium, while a brief 168 pages, is the result of years of archival investigation and a comprehensive knowledge of Louisiana and the northern Gulf Coast and their peoples. The author, William A. Read, was a linguist and distinguished professor in the English department at Louisiana State University from 1902 to 1940. In Read’s first years at LSU, he focused his intellect on the semiotics of Keatsian and Spenserian poetry until eventually dedicating himself to investigating the vernacular linguistics of Louisiana’s people. Read’s tenure at LSU largely coincided with that of Fred B. Kniffen and later, James A. Ford. By no small coincidence, Read’s work on Louisiana’s folk dialects parallels Kniffen’s vernacular cultural geographies and Ford’s culture history of Louisiana. As a scholar of Louisiana and the greater South’s indigenous peoples, Read maintained substantive correspondence and collaboration with the famed Smithsonian ethnographer John Stanton. During his long career, Dr. Read was a prolific publisher, producing nine books and over forty articles, manuscripts, and reviews.

This publication, minus a wonderfully concise introduction and some minimal editing by Dr. Riser, is a direct compilation of Read’s 1927 monograph of the same name, his “More Indian Place Names in Louisiana” from the July 1928 volume of Louisiana Historical Quarterly, and a chapter from his magnum opus, 1931’s Louisiana French, economically titled “Indian Words”. Each of these three works come divided into separate chapters with no additions or context given by the editor.

In the eponymous first section, Read provides a succinct introduction to the indigenous languages—Choctaw, Caddoan dialects, Atakapa, and Mobilian—mostly, employed in his work. Read is clearly an authority on Choctaw and his addition of a page-long primer on Choctaw phonetics comes in handy later as one invariably attempts to sound out the similarity of the indigenous root words and the current toponyms. Read follows with a comprehensive but brief etymology of the word “bayou” given its ubiquity in Louisiana’s place names. The bulk of this section, and the majority of the book, is an alphabetical but by no means rote listing of toponyms with phonetic transcriptions followed by a chronologically ordered and source-referenced list of the word in historical documents and maps. This latter fact makes the book an excellent desk reference for historical geographers of the South and distinguishes it from some other lists of toponyms for particular states.

What follows each entry’s standardized reference information is more unique by entry, varying from authoritatively comprehensive etymology with the proper indigenous root words to exposition of the contested and sometimes indefinable meaning(s) of a toponym. Read almost always includes the addition of geographical or historical evidence, often in wonderfully detailed but never convoluted tangents, to verify his assertions. His entries also at times include educated guesses at why the contemporary spellings and pronunciations are so distorted from their original forms. Take the example of Tickfaw, LA. Read writes:

the second element of the name is obviously the Choctaw foha or “rest,” “ease”. The first...