While trying to figure out if Muskogean (the language family to which Choctaw and Chickasaw, among others, belong) is considered to be part of any larger grouping (apparently some people take it for granted it’s part of the “Hokan-Siouxan” group while others treat it as independent, Wikipedia calls Hokan itself “a hypothetical grouping of a dozen small language families spoken in California and Mexico” and says “few linguists today expect Hokan as a whole to prove to be valid,” and I’m certainly not qualified to even have a thought about the matter), I ran across an interesting paper (pdf file; abstract here) by Prof. George Aaron Broadwell called “Reconstructing Proto-Muskogean Language and Prehistory: Preliminary results” that’s chock-full of the kind of detailed lexical comparisons and reconstructions I so enjoy. One thing that makes it exotic from the point of view of someone trained in Indo-European (where the inherited vocabulary includes terms for ‘beech,’ ‘birch,’ ‘wolf,’ and ‘salmon’) is the list of “Reconstructable Proto-Muskogean terms,” which includes words for chestnut, chicken snake, chickenhawk, chigger, chinquapin, chipmunk, civet cat (?), clam/spoon, copperhead, corn, cotton, and crawfish, to take only the c‘s (the full list is on pages 15-16 of the paper). But what impelled me to post about it is the point he makes about a common problem in historical linguistics:
How can we reconcile the presence of a word for corn
with the generally accepted archaeological position that corn was not present in the southeast until considerably later, ca. A.D. 700?…
A common approach in dismissing linguistic evidence that does not correlate with the archaeological results is to suggest that the reference of the words has changed through time (cf. Renfrew 1988). For example, the word for corn might have originally referred to some other grain. When corn was introduced to the southeast the word for the older grain might have been applied to the new-comer.
However, it seems unlikely that speakers of all the different languages in the family would have coincidentally decided to call the new grain the same thing. Once a language has split into two mutually unintelligable daughter languages, the speakers do not consult with each other about naming new phenomena.
The unlikeliness of this hypothesis increases when we realise that we must also assume that the words for shucking corn and corn riddle originally applied other actions and objects, and that once again widely separated people have
coincidentally chosen the same words for actions and objects associated with the new grain.
I therefore conclude that presence of a word for corn in Proto-Muskogean constitutes a genuine conflict between the linguistic and archaeological data.
I wish all historical linguists were so forthright about the difficulties involved in trying to correlate linguistic and archeological evidence.
Oh, and I learned a new word, lamb’s-quarters (Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate, the copyeditor’s bible, hyphenates it; the AHD does not), the common name for Chenopodium album, a kind of goosefoot that M-W says is “sometimes used as greens” but AHD simply, and unkindly, calls a “weed”; it’s taahwa in Creek and taani’ in Chickasaw. You can get a USDA “plant profile” here, see some more pictures here, and get ideas about collecting and eating it here [link dead as of 2012]. I’d still like to know how it got its striking name, though.