Columbia Plateau Indian Place Names: What Can They Teach Us?

Abstract

I propose a program for cross‐cultural research seeking semantic universals in place–name systems. Over 1000 place‐names in the Sahaptin Indian language of northwestern North America are analyzed for syntactic, semantic, and distributional regularities. Comparisons are drawn with Dena'ina Athabaskan, Yurok, and local English place‐name systems. Binomial place‐names are rare in Sahaptin, though common in other languages. Sahaptin place‐names very frequently are descriptive of biological and topographic features of sites. Many Sahaptin place‐names describe features of land and water as if in motion. Place‐names are sacred in origin; thus no places are named for persons. Quantitative analysis of the spatial distribution of place‐names unexpectedly reveals a striking correlation between place‐name density and population density which holds for a sample of 14 languages. This appears due to a tendency for an individual's repertoire of place‐names to be limited to approximately 500.

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