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email.msn.com>'Chicago'Etymology Carl Jeffrey Weber /Sheka:kwa/ was the basic Proto-Algonquian form for 'skunk'. It can be further broken into identifiable 'urine' + animal marker. Whether or not this /sheka:kwa/ is the form that gave Chicago its name, as Algonquianist dictionaries record, has been contested in local scholarship by Dr. William Barry, founder of the Chicago Historical Society, and among others, the historians Andreas, Quaif, Blanchard, and Pierce. If an intelligent non-linguist layman would like an etymology based on breaking down the word, it would be: 'chic' (urine) + 'ag' (animal marker) which equals 'urine animal'. However, it must be kept in mind that 'urinating animal' is closer. The root is 'urine'. The end o in 'Chicago' I'll call a "vestigial stem extender" (or vestigial noun formative) - as it might be called in Algonquian linguistics. Three syllables. Chicago. An earlier form, four syllables (but still really three if you give the glide its consonantal value) -- as seen in some of the earliest French maps -- could be summed up in <chicagoua>. Notice the not-yet-vestigial stem extender -ou- (an unrounded glide) and the following -a (the target vowel of the glide). The -a is the single/animate gender marker. When the final -a was lost to speech, the glide seems to have become a high unrounded back vowel which with time and Americanization gave us the current o sound in the word. Four syllables, <chicagoua>. There's a still earlier form in the intermediate language (see below). But this earlier form had lost ITS ending by the time the French began writing the name <chicagoua> on maps. When the French first heard the word, they obviously had to have heard the word spoken in some particular language -- developing from the Proto-Algonquian language family roots. The root meaning of the word would have been understood over thousands of miles of navigable waters, among the related tribes. What particular language 'Chicago' is from (if the question is productive at all) seems to have been narrowed to the following: Ojibwe, Meskaakii (Fox), Miami-Illinois, and Cree. Some of the forms (in all but Cree) of the intermediate languages: zhigaagwanzh Ojibwe shikaakwashi Meskaakii shikaakonki Miami shikaakoki Miami Algonquianist scholars are not sure whether these intermediate forms are locatives (indicating place) or plurals. In local scholarship, the dominant (vs the dormant) view has never questioned that these forms have been anything else but locative. Chicago's understanding of its own name is that 'Chicago' means "at the Allium tricoccum". Because of the bad smell, this plant -- a leek -- shared the word "skunk" with the animal. Broken down even more, as here presented, 'urine' is the root in 'urine animal', but 'urinating animal' is closer to the Algonquian conceptualization. (There are certain constraints in the locative vs plural uncertainty. Neither plurals nor locatives end in a vowel. Shikaakoki "on the skunk" is said to be rare in Algonquian and therefore probably not locative. The /shikaakonki/ form, with what I'll call "intrusive -n", has not been adequately explained. Some of the problem is in the calligraphy of the source documents. In the roundhands and italics used in the writing styles of the late 1600s, the intended letter combination -ou- often looked very much like -on- when written quickly. It's on French maps. Whoever set the printing type from the written notes even has LaSalle saying 'chicagon'. This no doubt has stymied many.Mail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue