E3: What's In a Name?

Languaging Episode 3: Notes

Title: Languaging in Hampton Roads

Episode 3: What's in a Name?

Hosts: Jill Winkowski and Prue Salasky

Date: March 22, 2024

Length: 21:19 minutes

Publication Frequency: Fourth Friday of each month

In this third episode of Languaging in Hampton Roads, co-hosts Jill Winkowski and Prue Salasky explore how words get added to the English language and their discussion focuses primarily on the addition of words from the Algonquian family of languages.

Word origins can be murky business. Some of the earliest additions of Native American words into English came from the accounts of early settlers. Captain John Smith, the English soldier and explorer who became a colonial governor in Virginia, and Roger Williams, the founder of Rhode Island, among many others, kept ethnographic accounts of the Native American language and culture.

The Native American language most local to us in Tidewater is Powhatan, an Eastern Algonquian language, and we learn from John Smith's accounts that words such as raccoon, possum, and persimmon entered English from that language.

To really get to the bottom of word origins, Prue and Jill go to sea to explore one word in particular, that is, the name of "the most important fish in the sea," the Atlantic menhaden.

While combing sources and knocking on the doors of experts to find out the origins of the name, they came across, as frequently happens when researching words, stories. Many stories. From the story of Roger Williams who wrote down the Narragansett name of a silver fish as munnawhatteaug to the accounts of the 19th century fish researcher G. Brown Goode, who, in addition to his scientific research, scoured the east coast for the myriad nicknames for the filter feeder. Other stories that emerged were those of the generations of the menhaden fishermen themselves and the current controversy around industrial menhaden fishing.

Nailing down the origins of the word menhaden, it turns out, is as slippery as the fish itself. They even sought out the advice of Smithsonian emeritus linguist Ives Goddard who consoled them that tracking down the origins of fish names are notoriously difficult.

While Jill and Prue had to settle for a probable origin of the word, the real lesson was in the journey. Language is constantly changing. That is part of its beauty, that it morphs with shifting demographics, cross cultural contact, and sometimes, just plain necessity.

Prue and Jill end the episode with an account of an emerging use of Native American language in archeaology, where Scott Dawson from Hatteras describes using Croatoan words for the artifacts they are excavating at their sites on the island.

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CREDITS: Original music by Skye Zentz; Languaging logo by Patty McDonald; technical help by Michael Lusby at the Sound Studio at Slover Library in Norfolk, Va.

Languaging in Hampton Roads is written and produced by Jill Winkowski and Prue Salasky