Indian Place Names in Alabama

FOREWORD

FOREWORD What is the "meaning" of names like Coosa and Tallapoosa? Who named the Alabama and Tombigbee and Tennessee rivers? How are Cheaha and Conecuh and Talladega pronounced? How did Opelika and Tuscaloosa get their names? Questions like these, which are asked by laymen as well as by historians, geographers, and students of the English language, can be answered only by study of the origins and history of the Indian names that dot the map of Alabama. These relics, like fossils embedded in rocks, are traces of extinct cultures, of people found by European explorers, infiltrated by traders and settlers, and eventually moved to distant reservations. Adopted Indian names have two distinct stages of history: (1) as words in a source language, and (2) as names in American English. Ethnolinguists and historians of aboriginal America are interested in the composition of words surviving as place names and in their significance in tribal life. Students of American English onomastics are interested in the date and circumstances of adoption and subsequent alteration and spreading or extinction of the names as English words. Usually there is no relationship between the two stages in the history of a name, except when an Indian name is translated to make an American place name. The name Sylacauga was preserved because its translation 'buzzard's roost' would have been distasteful as the name of a town, but Buzzard's Roost Bluff on the Tombigbee River is a translated name that lasted; the bluff is not a populated place and the name evidently offended no one, may even have seemed picturesque. Names like Black Warrior, Broken Arrow, and Salt Creek would have no rationale if we did not know that they were translated. The etymology of such names clearly contributes to our knowledge of naming processes. But the widespread curiosity about the meaning of surviving Indian names is harder to understand. We know that mississippi meant 'big river' to the Algonquians, but we have no idea what tennessee meant to the Cherokees. Both names serve equally well. Whether alabama prehistorically had a general meaning v vi FOREWORD like 'brush clearers' or a more specific meaning like 'medicinal herb gatherers' has had no apparent effect on the history of the state. Nevertheless, there is a persistent interest in the etymology of place names of Indian origin, and the "meaning" of such names evidently has symbolic value to many people. To answer the questions of both professionals and laymen about Alabama Indian place names, W. A. Read wrote in 1937 the only extensive study of the subject. His conclusions are careful, informed, and frequently tentative, never dogmatic. William Alexander Read (1869-1962) was an early leader in the serious study of Southern American English. Trained in Germanic and Romance philology at G6ttingen, Heidelburg, Johns Hopkins, Grenoble, and Oxford (where he studied phonetics under Henry Sweet), he wrote extensively on Southern pronunciation and lexical importation. He was a respected member of the American Dialect Society, the Modern Language Association , the Linguistic Society of America, and the English Place Name Society. From 1902 to 1940 he was the head of the English Department at Louisiana State University. Like a few other philologists of his generation, notably Edward Sapir and Leonard Bloomfield, Read became interested in American Indian languages, studying particularly those spoken in the southeastern states. He made Indian place names one of his special fields and wrote monographs on the names left on the maps of Louisiana, Florida, and Alabama by the aboriginal inhabitants of the region. He was one of the founders of scholarly study of toponymy in the United States, and his Indian PlaceNames in Alabama, completed in 1936 and published in 1937, is still a primary reference work. In his review of Read's Alabama book (American Speech, 12:212-15), John R. Swanton supplemented the comments on several names and suggested alternative interpretations of a few. In the same journal (13:79-80) Read added ten names and referred to Swanton's review without disagreeing on any point. In the early 1940s I asked him for help in translating Creek names, and he wrote me several times, generously giving me information that I could not find elsewhere. I thus am confident that he would FOREWORD vii welcome a re-issue of his monograph if he were alive today, particularly one including his own additions and making use of sources that he did not have in...