A brief addendum to my previous post. In it, I invented two temporary coined terms for
the sake of convenience, to make communication easier: I coined "Panaic"
to refer to the clade of Caddoan peoples and languages that includes Pawnee and
Arikara (who share a relatively-recent common ancestor), and
"Minnetaric" for the same reason viz. Crow, Hidatsa, and Mandan. I used these terms because I was writing
about prehistory, and needed a way to refer to two present-day groups' common
ancestor, before they differentiated into their respective identities, in a
concise manner. I did not know whether
any other terms had ever been used by Real Scholars™ for these groups.
I've since found a couple plausible substitutions
for my "Panaic". The first is
a diagram of the Caddoan language family tree, from Wallace Chafe's The History and Geography of the Caddo
Language (2004), wherein the term "Pawneean" is used:
The second is from Douglas Parks' Bands and Villages of the Arikara and Pawnee
(1979):
"In
this paper I shall use "Panian" as a cover term to include the
Arikara, Skiri, and all of the other bands of Pawnee; i.e., all of the Pawnee
groups north of the Wichita. I prefer
this term to the use of the name Pawnee, since I want to distinguish between
the contemporary Pawnee tribe and the larger number of formerly autonomous
groups that developed from Proto-Panian, the Ursprache of these bands." (endnote 1)
Of the two homophonous terms, "Pawneean"
and "Panian", I prefer the latter because its distinct spelling helps
avoid being misinterpreted as referring solely to the Pawnee—I have seen people
make similar mistakes with names like "Caddoan" and
"Siouan", mistakenly believing them to just be adjectives referring
to the Caddo and Sioux, respectively.
So, then I now have a "real" term to use in place of my
temporary coinage of "Panaic".
Here are the relevant maps from the last post, updated:
No luck yet on finding a legitimate substitute
for "Minnetaric", which is a shame since that was the weaker of the
two coinages.¹ I had based it on
"Minnetaree," an old designation of the Hidatsa which comes from the
Mandans' name for them, but had mistakenly thought it was also cognate with the
name "Mandan" (which either comes from Assiniboine
"Mayatani" or from Lakota Miwátʰani,
depending on who you ask).² Since it
isn't, that makes it a less-fitting term that I previously thought... but until
I find a suitable replacement, it will have to do.
Notes
¹ Actually, there is "Missouri River
Siouan", but that's just... too much of a mouthful. It also doesn't sound specific enough—someone
who isn't familiar with terminology might assume it refers to any Siouans that
ever inhabited the Missouri River, which would include e.g. the Omaha and the
Lakota.
² Full disclosure: I don't actually know with
100% certainty that Mandan "Minitari" isn't cognate with Assiniboine "Mayatani"
and/or Lakota Miwátʰani³—I don't
have access to any good Mandan or Assiniboine dictionaries, so I'm unable to
check right now. "Minitari" is
usually said to mean "they crossed the water", and Miwátʰani "owl feathers", but
I'm not sure how much trust or import to give either etymology.
³ Footnoteception: the italics indicate that
the spelling is from a legit linguistic source—in this case, Bruce Ingham's Lakota-English Dictionary. The quotation marks indicate a
probably-deficient-in-some-way transcription from a non-linguistic source.
