I was smiling right through that excerpt; I only realised when I was fifteen or so that the "Corn" in "Corn Flakes" implied a specific grain, the old usage having stayed around on the east coast of the Atlantic.

Of course the development of the meaning in English doesn't have anything to do with the development of the word for Maize in Muskogean, but using ambiguous language [well, yes, it's not, really, because it's clear Broadwell is using American English--still some part of me is aware of the possible confusion] to describe ambiguous data is the sort of approach to saying nothing at all that I would laugh at from Flann O'Brien.

Is this the same paper where he discusses the problems of branches of Muskogean? I think it's interesting how the four or seven languages of Muskogean are classified in more ways ways by different linguists than you might think possible for such a relatively small and transparently related family.

Yes, it's the same paper.

Lamb's-quarters: One theory says that the mature leaf looks like a cut of lamb’s meat––the quarter. An article at http://www.rawfoodinfo.com/articles/art_LambsQuarTreasury.html says another common name for it is "mutton tops", which supports the looking like a cut of meat theory. Not sure how that fits in with looking like a goosefoot (Linneaus)or with its zillions of other common names: baconweed, cenizo blanco, dirtweed, dirty dick, fat hen, frost blite, hélunjóli, hvidmelet gåsefod, jauhosavikka ...

"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."

Not necessarily, cf the problems with the word for 'whiskey' in Iroquois languages (all 'cognate' compounds meaning 'fire-water'). Basically the diferent groups decided on the same word, a compound of 'fire' and 'water', which were both terms cognate between the different languages. That way you get a nice set of regular correspondences of an item that obviously post-dates the breakup of the family. The same is true for "washing machine" in Yolngu.

Does he happen to mention the Dravidian-origins theory?

OED: 1773 J. HAWKESWORTH Voy. III. 442 We also once or twice met with a plant like what the country people in England call *Lamb's quarters, or Fat-hen. Evelyn (1699) does not mention it (or any of its other common names).

The meaning, I would guess, comes not from the part of the garden where the lambs hang out, but from some no longer obvious visual similarity between the leaf and the hindquarters of a lamb either living or dead.

On preview (long lunch), I see Janet has already brought up this theory. To lamb's quarters, goosefoot, and fat hen, add pigweed for 4 domestic animal common names.

Also, I would take all the archeological dates for corn reaching a particular latitude with a considerable amount of salt.

Yes, corn could have been known before it was widely grown.

The linguistic time depth estimate is based on Swadesh's standard rate of change, but I think I've heard of cases where this is known to give a very wrong estimate. Also, Johanna Nichols suggests languages with head-marking typology may destroy cognate evidence faster than dependent-marking languages that make up most of the familiar large Old World families.

Chenopodium/goose foot was actually a domesticated plant in the eastern US. It is now a common weed, but 2kya it was domesticated for larger seeds and was used extensively along with marsh elder and others as a major cereal until maize became important.

Archaeologists only have a few direct data points for the introduction of maize into Eastern US and it is very possible this date may change as new finds get dated. The best evidence is that it arrives circa AD 700, but it could have arrived earlier. At the beginning, it was used as as a minor food crop. Despite its unimportance as food early on, it appears to be ceremonially very important and is found in some interesting ritual contexts. This might be the clue to unravelling the linguistic mystery.

BTW, our best evidence is that betwen 1000-1200 AD maize becomes an important staple crop and begins to be used for 30-80% of the caloric intake. Our evidence for this comes from carbon isotpe analysis of skeletal remains and it is pretty unambiguous.

Patrick, are those dates just for the South-East US or for elsewhere too?

Edward Sapir, in the 1920's, connected the Muskogean Indian languages most closely with Hokan-Siouan. Other linguists since then have felt that Sapir's assesment was premature and have suggested Algonquin and even Mayan as closer relatives instead. I'm partial to Algonquin myself but still, nobody really knows.

Where an item or technology diffuses gradually from one group to the next, it seems quite plausible that the ones to whom it is new will calque the term used by those from whom they have acquired it, since it is very likely that they will understand their neighbors' language. This process will lead to pseudo-cognates whose actual time-depth is less than it appears to be.

Also, a comment on Hokan, which is a group that I have studied. Nobody but the most extreme long-rangers takes Hokan-Siouan or any form of Macro-Hokan seriously anymore. There just isn't decent evidence for them. Even core Hokan is considered unproven, and very likely not a family. Some of the "core Hokan" languages probably are related, but others are doubtful. In particular, it is fairly widely thought that Chumashan does not belong with the rest.

This is an interesting case in that there has never been any good evidence for Hokan. Hokan was cobbled together with tiny bits of evidence, almost all of it nothing but words that vaguely resemble each other. The sets of putative cognates were mostly tiny, regular sound correspondances non-existant. Hokan is to a large extent a relic of a period of unfettered speculation.

Thanks, Bill -- I love hearing from people who are actually au courant with subjects where I have to depend on whatever snippets I happen upon.

Clarie - Those dates are definiely for the southeast, which I know best, and for much of the eastern U.S at least as far north as Ohio and Maryland. It would have been later for the northen part (New England, Great Lakes area) because maize required some genetic changes to adapt to the shorter summers.

Marianne Mithun in The Languages of Native North America (which is a fun book, Hat, you should consider getting a copy) doesn't mention Hokan-Siouan at all, let alone any relationship between it and Muskogean. Hokan, Macro-Siouan (including Caddoan and Iroquoian) and Gulf (which hypothetically includes Muskogean together with various other Southeastern languages) are listed as "stocks", in the sense of hypothetical related groups above the level of the family. Mithun is skeptical of all of them, particularly Gulf. Of Hokan she says

Evaluation of the Hokan hypotheses remains problematic. The antiquity of Hokan would be at least as great as that of Indo-European, if not much greater, but documentation of the languages is considerably more limited. Many of the languages are spoken in contiguous areas, [...] The prolonged contact among speakers of many of the languages makes it difficult to distinguish true cognates from early loans. Furthermore, some languages proposed as Hokan seem to share more features with languages considered outside of Hokan than with others within Hokan (Haas 1964b). Hypotheses of a Hokan stock as a genetic unit continue to play an important role in prompting investigation of the historical relationships between these languages, but it should be recognized that Hokan is not yet considered a demonstrated genetic entity.

My mummy told me when I was little that they were called 'lamb's quarters' because they were soft like little lambs. Folk etymology is grand! Lamb's quarters were called 'melde' in Saxon, which is thought to be the root of such place names as Milden and Melbourn (Cambridgeshire). The plant was a staple food in Europe since prehistoric times - according to my well thumbed copy of Richard Mabey's -Food for Free-, '. . . the seeds formed part of the last, ritual gruel fed to Tollund Man.' The young leaves are quite tasty, rather like spinach.

Long ago Mary Haas connected Algonquian to Muskogean in a grouping she called 'Macro-Algonquian' (funnily, it wasn't called 'Macro-Muskogean'). No one takes this grouping seriously anymore, especially not Algonquianists. The two families are NOTHING alike typologically, save for being head-marking.

I thought there were basically TWO theorized groupings of Muskogean -- one that has Chickasaw/Choctaw as the first branching, as opposed to the other that has Creek/Seminole as the first branch. Everyone seems to agree that these are the two 'ends' of the family, with Koasati/Alabama and Mikasuki intermediate between them.

The presence of a reconstructible word for corn in Proto-Muskogean doesn't surprise me much. If archaeology has corn present in the southeast at AD 700, it probably was known a few centuries before that. At 500 AD the Muskogean languages probably weren't that different yet, and they were probably still geographically pretty close together, so it seems entirely possible that some Muskogean dialect borrowed the word and passed it to all the others. If none of the dialects had undergone any of the relevant diagnostic sound changes yet, this borrowing would be indistinguishable from an inherited Proto-Muskogean etymon.

A similar analog from Algonquian is that Proto-Algonquian has a cleanly reconstructible word for 'seal', as in the animal. However, most people are rather uncomfortable locating the Proto-Algonquians anywhere where there were seals -- the only candidate locations would be Hudson Bay, Lake Ontario, or the Maritimes, none of which work well for various reasons. So the compromise position now is that most researchers think the word arose at a later time after PA had broken up (but not by too much), and that the word was simply passed around among different sister dialects/languages.

David: Koasati and Mikasuki at opposite ends of the spectrum? From my readings, Koasati is closest to Alibamu, then Appalachee, and then Mikasuki. Mikasuki is often described as a language descended from Hitchiti. This passage at Access Geneology says http://www.accessgenealogy.com/native/tribes/creek/creekhist.htm

"The people speaking the cognate Hitchiti and Koasati were contemptuously designated as "Stincards" by the dominant Muscogee. The Koasati seem to have included the ancient Alibamu of central Alabama, while the Hitchiti, on lower Chattahoochee river, appear to have been the remnant of the ancient people of southeast Georgia, and claimed to be of more ancient occupancy than the Muscogee."

A former student of Mvskoke, I have had a soft spot for Koasati for decades. It's one of the most robust of Native American languages - 98% of the tribe in Louisiana still speak it. Hope they weren't hit too bad by the latest Hurricanes.

Also,there were outlying languages like Natchez which are classified as tentatively within Muskogean. Natchez was spoken into the 1940s by the Sam family, with whom Mary Haas worked. Watt Sam's son, Archie Sam, a noted Creek traditionalist and keeper of the flame for Natchez identity, continued searching for speakers of Natchez until his death in 1996.

Here is a comparative vocabulary of Atakapa, Tunica, Natchez and Chitimacha: http://www.native-languages.org/famgul_words.htm

Compare to Muskogean: http://www.native-languages.org/fammus_words.htm

Oops! Sorry David, I misread your post concerning Koasati / Mikasuki. Apologies. And my sources equating Natchez with Muskogean are out of date... that's the problem of living 1000 kilometers from the nearest decent English language library.

As for Muskogean, what I meant was that the greatest distance in the family is clearly between Chickasaw/Choctaw on one hand, and Creek/Seminole on the other. Koasati/Alabama and Hitchiti/Mikasuki are intermediate between them, and share several isoglosses with both.

Natchez MIGHT be very distantly related to Muskogean, but it's not 'a Muskogean language'. It's typologically rather similar to Muskogean, but that doesn't necessarily mean anything. It's very hard to find convincing cognates between Natchez and Muskogean. I personally think Natchez is just an isolate.

There's a very nice sketch of Natchez by Geoff Kimball (speaking of Koasati) just published earlier this year in the Scancarelli/Hardy volume 'Native Languages of the Southeastern United States'. Considering he worked entirely off fieldnotes from seventy years ago, he managed to figure out quite a lot.

Epazote is a Mexican chenepodium closely related to goosefoot/lambsquarters. It's traditionally added to beans as a pot herb, where it's believed to be an anti-flatulent.

If you've got a decent mercado in the area, you should be able to pick up some dried epazote year-round. (I've always found it in one of those cellophane packets hanging near the dried whole chilis.) Try adding it to a big pot of pinto beans. It's got kind of a funky/musty taste that's off-putting at first, and then you start to want more. "Oh, that's strange," you'll say. "I don't think I like it. Maybe one more taste...."

Yeah, I used to eat epazote when I lived in Astoria, Queens, with its booming Mexican population. Ever had huitlacoche? Sounds so much better than "corn smut"! Tastes good, too, and not like anything else I've ever eaten.

Hmmm. So far the comments haven't mentioned the *other* lambs-quarters, Trillium erectum, also known colloquially as bethroot, birthroot, wakerobin, Indian balm, Indian shamrock, squaw root, and ground lily. That such an intriguing common name would be applied to two such distinct plants demonstrates the usual failing of common names. Alas, all my sources are silent as to the origin/association with lambs and quarters.

Unrelated languages in the New World? What happened to the paradigm of three waves of migration that was published with such fanfare ca. 1983?

Amerind, Na-Dene and Eskimo-Aleut. (Or was one of those Athabascan?) Blood types, dental patterns, and linguistics aided by computer analysis was said to have made sense out of it and archeologists pinned down the last two migrations to 2000BCE and 4000BCE although the first might be any of several times before 12000BCE. And they all originated in practically the same neighborhood in what is now northwestern China.

The second wave settled west of the Rockies and the third wave got stuck in the Arctic because the first wave was already well established everywhere else. And Kennewick Man couldn't possibly be an ancestor of the Indians who live in Washington now because their ancestors didn't arrive until 5,000 years after he died.

This was all starting to make nice neat sense, and now you say that there are languages in North America that don't seem to be related to any others? What happened to the three-migration model?

BTW, you can grow your own epazote and save a fortune. Talk about a weed. If you can't get the seeds online, buy the freshest stalks you can find and stick them in pots with Rootone. We live surrounded by redwoods with only a few hours of direct sunlight per day in the summer and the epazote practically took over our greenhouse.