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Tepa/Miapimoqui ethnonyms

From:Dirk Elzinga <dirk_elzinga@...>
Date:Monday, February 4, 2002, 17:40
At 5:25 PM +0000 02/03/02, And Rosta wrote:
>Dirk: >> At 2:21 AM +0000 02/01/02, And Rosta wrote: >> >Dirk: >> > >> >How are _Miamoqui_ and _Miamoquitch_ pronounced in Southern Paiute >> >and in English? >> >> Oops. I can't even get the Southern Paiute right. I just checked in >> Sapir's grammar and it should be Miapimoqui and Miapimoquitch (in >> English spelling). >> >> The spellings are meant to suggest the pronunciation as heard and >> produced by a native English speaker. > >I'd momentarily forgotten that this was transcribed by Alva Walker >and was instead thinking that it might have been transmitted via >Spanish or (improbably, given the geographical location) French.
It's possible that there are records from the 1776 Dominguez/Escalante expedition through the four-corners region which mention the Miapimoquitch. Unfortunately, my Spanish isn't up to the task. (I've toyed with the idea, though. I now live in Spanish Fork, Utah, which was named in honor of the two fathers; it was the furthest point north on their trip. They found the Timpanogos band of Utes, whom they described as being very friendly, and all indications were that they planned to come back and establish a mission. They never made it. It is fun to speculate what would have happened if they had come back; Utah might have become part of the Nueva Hispania culture area, and the Mormons may have just kept going west.)
> > In X-SAMPA: >> >> Miapimoqui Umpagup: [mi%j{pi"moUk_wi @m"p_h{g@p] >> Miapimoquitch : [mi%j{pi"moUk_wItS] >> >> In Southern Paiute, these are (with interlinears): >> >> Miapimoqui Umpagup: [mi"?app1_0%mOkk_wi ?am"paGap_h] >> >> mi"?a -p1 mOk_wi ?am"paka -p1 >> little -ABS Hopi talk -ABS >> >> Miapimoquitch: [mi"?app1_0mOkk_wItS_h] >> >> mi"?a -p1 mOk_wi -tS1 >> little -ABS Hopi -ABS > >Why do the Southern Paiute call the Tepa "Hopi"? Does "Hopi" >get applied to all local foreign peoples?
The Southern Paiute (like all Numic peoples) were "hunter-gatherers", while the Hopis were agriculturalists. The Hopis also lived in adobe villages (pueblos), and had a more hierarchical social structure than their Numic neighbors. The reason for calling the Tepa 'Miapimoquitch' is that they also lived in adobe villages and practiced agriculture. By modern times, however, the Miapimoquitch had dwindled in numbers and their culture must have seemed to the Southern Paiute to have been nothing more than a pale imitation of the Hopis. Hence, "Little Hopi." Perhaps a better term might be "Petty Hopi"? I'm pretty sure it'd be the same form in Southern Paiute. I'm thinking of Tolkien's usage of the term 'petty' to describe a group of dwarves who were not as technologically or culturally sophisticated as Durin's Folk (Mim, from the "Narn i hin Hurin," was the last of the Petty Dwarves).
> > I hadn't thought through the spelling of the language word >> completely; I think that rather than 'Ampagap' it should be >> 'Umpagup'; there might very well be some variation, though. > >How delicious! The icing on the cake would be if the politically >correct modern English pronunciation were /ump@gu(:)p/. > >--And.
-- Dirk Elzinga Dirk_Elzinga@byu.edu "Speech is human, silence is divine, yet also brutish and dead; therefore we must learn both arts." - Thomas Carlyle