Talk:Iroquoian languages

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment
This article is or was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment. Further details are available on the course page.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 00:48, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

Previously headerless discussion
http://www.mingolanguage.org/ Lachler, McElwain, and Burke Listen to Mingo Greetings, Mingo (Iroquois) etymology about boating: kaháwa' noun means boat. kényua'. This switch-interactive verb means to row a boat or more to ferry someone across a stretch of water. It belongs to the semantic fields the sea and transportation. Etymology kényua' -NYU- Verb Root. Grammatical Info Base -nyu-.Stem Class LX. Conjugation Class XX. kényua' "I row boats". kaháwa', (boat) grammatical info base -haw- Stem Class C, Prefix Class Agent, Linker Vowel ö. Note that the -h- at the beginning of this base is strong, and so does not drop out when it would come between two vowels. Varies with kahôwö'. Possessed Form akháwa' my boat. Plural Form kahawa'shö'ö boats. káhu' means "this way" or in this direction. To include the Mingo groups on the language map, one will "red-colour" over the region of West Virginia and eastern Ohio and western Pennsylvania otherwise the upper Ohio Valley to nearly the Susqueahanna region. The Anacostan Nuetralls, according to the earliest Baltimores records (1621-31) report they were trading with the Irowuois from beyond the Allegheny Mountains and Potomac Valley. Conaughy (talk) 18:09, 17 June 2008 (UTC)

Please feel free to remove anything offered. No offence will be taken nor meant ... I'll continue to assist our state's official archeologist, museums who call me over to lecture informally before official tribal clan's visits and ofcoarse other Wiki editors who have asked. Conaughy (talk) 18:52, 17 June 2008 (UTC)

Regarding Sources
Hello again Conaughy, I've added the "expert opinion" template on this article because I think it would be a very good idea to try and have some firm guidance at the onset regarding this subject. Iroquoian cultural studies in general is a vast and complex subject area and has been heavily written about over the past half century, linguistics in particular is very tricky. At this point it seems logical to me to get a reliable framework down from someone who really does know what they're talking about, once that's established the rest of us can plug away at fleshing it out. Once again, my advice is to go very easy on relying heavily on "older" sources, say pre 1950's-60's, as the field has changed a great deal in comparison to before that time. It's certainly not the case that any work done before that time is valueless, it's just that the sum total of scholarship in the area has increased to such an extent in the interim that a lot of information that was once regarded as the last word on the subject is now widely questioned (and sometimes completely rejected) by those who specialize in the subject. The Sanson map is a case in point. Archaeologists have completely rejected its accuracy here in southern Ontario, which should be a 'word to the wise' for others who are attempting to extrapolate and utilize it in other geographical areas. cheers Deconstructhis (talk) 19:13, 17 June 2008 (UTC)

I am very glad you point this out, respectfully. Perhaps I should have mentioned at least that Dr. Jordan Lachler is a linguist of Athabaskan and Keresan languages, has worked on Iroquoian dialects and is currently working on Haida. Dr. Thomas McElwain is on the faculty of the University of Stockholm in the Department of Comparative Religion. He is originally from West Virginia and is one of our few native speakers of West Virginia Mingo. I grew up on a little upper Cherokee, Mingoe and the cousin's Shawnee. I just thought maybe one of my grandma's people Iroquois dialect or maybe I should say, Unyææshæötká' language. I don't know as much about as these WIKI editors though. May I suggest:

Encyclopaedia Britannica 1988 ver. Book22: Page782 Languages of the World: Table 60: North American Indian Languages, quoting from them: "*Phyla given boldface; families in italics (including those consisting of single languages); single languages, or dialect groups so closely related that they can be treated as single languages, given in roman type  1981 estimate   Minimal num-er of speakers; i.e., under 10,"  My World Book Encyclopaedia was bought in 1963 of which I orginally grew up with. I sometimes cross-ref it because it has older forgotten things in it. Anyway, no WIKI linguists seem to be interested in this article considering how long the tag has been placed. The spellings of yesteryear and today is no problem in changing or deleting or as you may reason. There are plenty of variations in spelling the same Iroquois phrase-word. I guess it's like the old song, "one says patata, the other says potatoe..." cheers Conaughy (talk) 17:50, 1 July 2008 (UTC)

Indic?
Hi all, I was cleaning up a few misspellings in the lead when I noticed that some phonological aspects of Iroquoian languages were being contrasted with Indic languages. I'm a bit of an amateur linguist and I recognize, as does Wikipedia's own Indic disambiguation page, that Indic is generally recognized to refer to topics, including those linguistic, relating to the Indian subcontinent, so I added a clarification request template. Any idea why the Indic languages might have been singled out as a contrastive element in this fashion, as opposed to Basque or Ugric or...? I suspect, given the subject matter, that Native American might have been a better choice, but I am not an expert, so thought I'd bring it here for discussion. Cheers, Northumbrian (talk) 03:21, 17 July 2011 (UTC)

Relationship between the Iroquoian and Algic (Algonquian etc) language groups
Can anyone shed any light on the relationship between the Iroquoian and Algic (Algonquian etc) language groups? There must be some linguistic relationship, even if it has to be traced back to the general vicinity of Siberia! Heavenlyblue (talk) 23:54, 1 June 2012 (UTC)

True or False
True or false: origins--Inayity (talk) 22:39, 20 December 2013 (UTC)


 * Surprisingly enough, it might be true: Basque trade jargon > Montagnais > French.  But an Algonkian etymology is still possible.  See Iroquois: An Etymology and the editor's footnotes here. — kwami (talk) 00:49, 25 March 2014 (UTC)

Table organization Questioned
The table indents Lake Iroquois from the Northern Iroquois, but the terms are likely alternative names of the same thing. Removing that level of indentation would better organize the table. The Tuscarora aren't listed with Southern Iroquois either, but as a separate group. This strikes me as a single source error--whomever wrote that para didn't ever see (or understand) other scholars had classified the language with the Cherokee, iirc. Best regards, Fra nkB 23:28, 14 November 2016 (UTC)


 * These are linguistic classifications, not geographical, with the term Iroquoian, not Iroquois, in the same way that English is a Germanic language, but is not German. Although the Tuscarora people lived in the south before most moved to New York in the 1700s, their language is part of the Northern Iroquoian branch. Only Cherokee is in the Southern Iroquoian branch. However, you're right that the indentation is a problem. Tuscarora-Nottoway should be under Northern Iroquoian, as a sister to Lake Iroquoian. Huronian should be a sister to what's called here 'Five Nations Confederation of the Iroquois and Susquehannock', which should be changed as it is a novel term (at this moment a Google search finds that phrase on only this one page. See the references below for the usual terms). The limited knowledge we have of Neutral shows it was more like the Five Nations languages than Huronian. Since an Unclear category has been put here, Neutral, Erie, and Wenro should all be placed there due to the limited amount of data available. These are standard understandings of the Iroquoian family from many different scholars, who differ mostly on what to do with the Unclear languages. Eliminating Lake Iroquoian as a separate part of Northern Iroquoian is from the single source used by Glottolog (Julian 2010). For the usually accepted arrangement, see these references:      MT301 (talk) 01:20, 15 November 2016 (UTC)

Two changes to the table: 1) removed the tree image due to multiple issues (e.g., Susquehannock listed twice, Onondaga missing, etc). The link code is appended to my comment here in case anyone wants to edit it. 2) organized the text table to better match consensus of references, e.g. changed indenting to match subgrouping, moved languages to proper subgroups, changed label Five Nations Confederation of the Iroquois and Susquehannock, etc MT301 (talk) 23:16, 5 April 2017 (UTC)

Conestoga/Susquehannock/Andaste
I again undid the changes claiming Conestoga is a currently living language due to the continued lack of evidence from reliable sources:
 * 1) The link to the Conestoga language webpage on Living Dictionaries/Living Tongues has only one contributor, the same as the wiki editor claiming the language is still widely spoken, so is circular self-citing.
 * 2) The website of the Conestoga Language and Culture Authority referenced by that same wiki editor also appears to be the work of the same individual, furthering circularity and self-citing.
 * 3) The Living Tongues Institute itself doesn't check validity of submissions, e.g. if there is an actual community of speakers or if there is just a conlang, so is not in a position to justify the speaker status of a language. Cf. their entry for Dlëshood’ian -- it's given the ISO 639-3 code for Aari, a language from Ethiopia whose entry in Wikipedia doesn't mention the term Dlëshood’ian as a variant. It is also given geographical coordinates in New Jersey, not Ethiopia, and managed by someone named Hdjdjxh Hdhdhruieh.
 * 4) The same editor has modified the Susquehannock language page to give an estimated 3,000 to 20,000 speakers. The smaller number is almost as many as for Mohawk, and the larger is nearly 8,000 more than for Cherokee, and so puts Conestoga as the third largest Indigenous language spoken in the United States. With such massive numbers of speakers, the language would not be so overlooked as to be considered dormant any more than, say, Apache would. Those numbers alone suggest a hoax or severe misunderstanding of what the term "Conestoga" refers to.
 * 5) The grammar and vocabulary mentioned by this editor in the Susquehannock page and the Living Dictionaries grammar page are not of any Northern Iroquoian language, while the already-existing documentation of the Conestoga language shows it is clearly Northern (cf. the Susquehannock page's reference to Mithun (1981) analyzing previous documentation). What the editor gives appears to be a variant of Cherokee, the Southern Iroquoian language. The complete difference between the historically documented language and what the editor calls Conestoga here needs to be explained, as well as why his Conestoga is so much like Cherokee, the most divergent Iroquoian language, instead, to even begin to accept their "Conestoga" as accurate.

I don't know whether this is simply a hoax, which has happened before when a Mohawk speaker claimed to be a Susquehannock speaker in about the 70s, or someone's Iroquoian-based conlang, which has also happened before with Poliespo, or involves a family idiolect of Cherokee that ended up in Pennsylvania with a change of name to something local also starting with a C. In any of those cases, this is not what is known as Conestoga, Susquehannock, or Andaste.

MT301 (talk) 20:11, 2 January 2022 (UTC)


 * The modern Conestoga-Susquehannock tribe itself does not purport to have even close to a complete language, let alone any “native” speakers. They even list documents and confirm descended families who were officially documented as Native and list those who participated in the 1845 Conestoga land claims and the 1872 joint resolution. If there were truly any Native speakers remaining they would be known to the tribe and there would certainly be more than one single source claiming any knowledge beyond the existing materials. Even the 1757 record of the language spoken at Conestoga town made by interviewing Bill Sack (killed in the 1763 massacre) consisted not of Conestoga but largely Mingo language. 2600:100E:B06C:AE14:D116:6F28:1B2F:856A (talk) 21:36, 27 October 2023 (UTC)

Get over yourself. There is a whole community of speakers. We are still here. This is the truth. The argument you make about circularity is invalid. It is the ignorance and arrogance of the colonizer speaking through you. Scott Conestoga (talk) 11:56, 8 January 2022 (UTC)

This is not a conlang. People who are Conestoga have way better things to do with their time than create a conlang or try to perpetuate a hoax. Scott Conestoga (talk) 11:59, 8 January 2022 (UTC)

I understand that there might be concern on your part due to lack of understanding and knowledge of Conestoga Language and Culture. However, academics and enrolled American Indians have been contacted and shown information that is not yet been given to people who are not academics and are not Native American. Why are you incredulous to the possibility that white academics could have been wrong since 1763 about the survival of Conestoga Language and Culture? Do you speak any Iroquoian languages or do you merely speculate about them? If you are not Native, why are you so concerned about being right regarding the veracity of the facts of the survival of Conestoga people and Conestoga Language to the present? The truth is being presented to you and you cringe. Scott Conestoga (talk) 12:09, 8 January 2022 (UTC)

Northern Iroquoian and Lake Iroquoian
There's something off with the family tree. If Tuscarora–Nottoway is part of Lake Iroquoian too, as claimed in this edit, and so are the unclassified languages, the label "Lake Iroquoian" is redundant, because it is then synonymous with "Northern Iroquoian".

I don't have access to the original sources right now, but I'm inclined to think this is simply incorrect and Lake Iroquoian encompasses only Iroquois Proper and Huronian, compare. According to the page linked, there's even doubt about "Lake Iroquoian" as a valid clade, so it's better to limit rather than extend its scope. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 01:07, 28 March 2023 (UTC)


 * That edit was undone long ago, in that no source (to my knowledge) puts Tuscarora-Nottoway as within Lake Iroquoian. The closest is the referenced Julian work, but that doesn't put Tuscarora-Nottoway within Lake Iroquoian either, but denies Lake Iroquoian is a grouping at all. For Julian, all of the Northern Iroquoian languages are direct descendants or sub-groupings of Northern, no Lake at all
 * MT301 (talk) 13:43, 28 March 2023 (UTC)


 * That edit wasn't undone long ago, but specifically by me in late March. The tree still showed Tuscarora–Nottoway and all the unclassified languages as within Lake Iroquoian through its nesting structure. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 22:29, 8 April 2023 (UTC)
 * Sorry, either my correction itself was undone, or maybe I just didn't save it. But yes, Lake = Iroquois Proper + Huronian (no Tuscarora). Northern = Lake + Tuscarora-Nottoway. The table nesting as of the moment I'm writing this looks correct
 * MT301 (talk) 16:52, 7 May 2023 (UTC)