Why do so many U.S. place names end in ee?

[Viktor77]

This seems to be the most obvious question never asked. I spent half an hour on Google trying to find someone who asked it. If you grew up in the U.S. then place names ending in ee are as ubiquitous and American as apple pie. Tennessee, Milwaukee, Okeechobee, Menominee, Wausaukee, Missaukee, Kewaunee, Chatahoochee, Muskogee, Tuskegee, Tittabawassee, etc. I could go on for hours. Even the name Cherokee ends in ee. And it might be that Missouri, Kentucky, Mississippi, and Miami are also variants with French or some other orthographic influence.

Not all of these names come from the same language. Milwaukee is Potawatomi (another potential ee word BTW) and Tennesee is Cherokee and Okeechobee is Hitchiti. They seem to cross language families between at least Algic, Iroquoian, and Muscogean languages which is bizarre. This suffix must denote a place but why is it so ubiquitous, and especially across languages and language families? And why is it so often rendered 'ee' instead of say 'ie' or 'y'?

[CatDoom]

I think it might partly have to do with vowel reduction. You could probably find a similar number of place names ending in [ə]; final kind of stands out because it's the only tense vowel that normally appears in final syllables in American English.

EDIT: After a bit of cursory research on the etymologies of the specific geographical terms you mentioned, I'm pretty certain that there's no morphological correspondence between the different -ee endings. The names come from a variety of different word-formation processes, and some don't seem to have originally ended in . It's entirely possible that Anglophone renderings of native place names in the eastern US influenced one another, and endings resembling "-ee" fell together over time through analogy.

[zompist]

FWIW, if you compare these to my Amerindian words page, -ee endings aren't typical of other borrowings from Algonquian and nearby families.

[Pabappa]

Well Happy tensing wasnt cvommon if you go back far enough, so its possible that -ee and -y would have been pronounced differently. Ther ewas some fluctuation even before 1800, though, as the British surname Huccaby came to be pronounced Huckabee.

[linguoboy]

This suffix must denote a place but why is it so ubiquitous, and especially across languages and language families? And why is it so often rendered 'ee' instead of say 'ie' or 'y'?

Isn't the second most common vowel (after [a]) cross-linguistically? Given that, what makes this distribution in the least bit remarkable?

As for the spelling, I like CatDoom's suggestion that a practice which started (for whatever reason) along the Eastern Seaboard became a convention as it was subsequently applied to other native names in order to distinguish them from European-derived ones (including renderings of native names according to the conventions of other European languages, such as French or Spanish). Page through Hobson-Jobson and you'll find copious examples from the same period of borrowings from languages spoken in other areas colonised by the British with final /i(:)/ rendered ee.

[Fuck me, can't we come up with some reasonable solution which allows us to put brackets around i without screwing up the formatting? One of my other fora has a dedicated "ipa" tag which serves just this purpose.]

[Travis B.]

This suffix must denote a place but why is it so ubiquitous, and especially across languages and language families? And why is it so often rendered 'ee' instead of say 'ie' or 'y'?

Isn't the second most common vowel (after [a]) cross-linguistically? Given that, what makes this distribution in the least bit remarkable?

As for the spelling, I like CatDoom's suggestion that a practice which started (for whatever reason) along the Eastern Seaboard became a convention as it was subsequently applied to other native names in order to distinguish them from European-derived ones (including renderings of native names according to the conventions of other European languages, such as French or Spanish). Page through Hobson-Jobson and you'll find copious examples from the same period of borrowings from languages spoken in other areas colonised by the British with final /i(:)/ rendered ee.

[Fuck me, can't we come up with some reasonable solution which allows us to put brackets around i without screwing up the formatting? One of my other fora has a dedicated "ipa" tag which serves just this purpose.]

I used to be able to write it as:

Code: Select all

[[b][/b]i]

but now that does not seem to work for some reason.

[vokzhen]

I gave up on trying to figure it out and just did or [ i]. You can also put it in a link but that's pretty distracting too.

[Nortaneous]

words words [і] words words italicized words words words [і] words

[Pole, the]

words words [і] words words italicized words words words [і] words

Nort, why you so RTL?

[vokzhen]

words words [і] words words italicized words words words [і] words

I was trying to figure it out and now just putting in an unpaired works fine, so I have a feeling Zompist may have done something.

And yea, your quotes are all right-to-left Nort.

Code: Select all

[quote="[etouq/]sdrow [i] sdrow sdrow [/i]sdrow dezicilati[i] sdrow sdrow [i] sdrow sdrow["Nortaneous

[KathTheDragon]

You just have to remove the character after Nort's name.

[Nortaneous]

here is a normal i: /i/ . now here is some italicized text.

here іs a magic і: /і/ [і]. now here іs some іtalіcіzed text.

here is another normal i: /i/ . here іs another magіc і: /і/ [і].

[zompist]

Bah. There's supposed to be a [ noparse ] command, but it's not working.

This probably looks ugly: ［i］(full-width brackets)

Nort's last post probably works because unpaired commands are usually ignored.

[Nortaneous]

Nort's last post probably works because unpaired commands are usually ignored.

The last one works for that reason, yes, but the line above it works, and it's paired.

~*~*~*magic*~*~*~

[Pole, the]

Nort's last post probably works because unpaired commands are usually ignored.

The last one works for that reason, yes, but the line above it works, and it's paired.

~*~*~*magic*~*~*~

s/mag/cyrill/

[Boşkoventi]

If you grew up in the U.S. then place names ending in ee are as ubiquitous and American as apple pie. Tennessee, Milwaukee, Okeechobee, Menominee, Wausaukee, Missaukee, Kewaunee, Chatahoochee, Muskogee, Tuskegee, Tittabawassee, etc. I could go on for hours

I was tempted to agree with you, but it turns out there are are plenty of place names that do not end in "-ee":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_p ... can_origin

(I would guess that words ending in "-ee" stand out, since that's pretty unusual among English words, and so we notice them more than others.)

As for why "-ee" vs. "-ie" or "-y" ... well, "ee" is the most obvious way to spell /i(:)/ in English. Though there are also a good number of place names with "-y" as well.

[Io]

[Fuck me [...]

It should work with zero-width-non-joiner, let's see: [i] la la la la la.

Yep, it works, just insert Alt+0157 somewhere inside the brackets.

P.S. I use the trick on another board to get around word censorship.

[Viktor77]

I certainly have no arguments against the ideas put forth in this thread. They certainly make sense, especially the way in which 'ee' might've come to be used as a sort of go-to Nativicization.

I would only say that if this just boils down to the fact that just happens to be one of the most prevalent of vowels (like [a]) and that's why so many Native American words end in it, could there be more to that? Has there ever been a theory posited that unites the languages of North America? Perhaps then it is a feature that goes back to a proto-language that has been remarkably strong because of the tenseness of , much like 'tu' in Indo-European languages.

But I would like to know what place names ending in schwa that CatDoom is referring to. Is he basically referencing place names like Tuscaloosa or Peoria, where because of English influence they have final schwa? I'd add that I don't see this as a resulting from reduction taking place in the source language. Other Native American place names often end in -a (see above) or -au (Wausau and Waukesha) and I don't have anything to suggest either of those were reduced in the source language.

[linguoboy]

[1] I would only say that if this just boils down to the fact that [ i] just happens to be one of the most prevalent of vowels (like [a]) and that's why so many Native American words end in it, could there be more to that? [2] Has there ever been a theory posited that unites the languages of North America? [3] Perhaps then it is a feature that goes back to a proto-language that has been remarkably strong because of the tenseness of [ i ], much like 'tu' in Indo-European languages.

[1] Sure, there could be, but the evidence presented so far gives us no reason at all suspect that there is. A subset of arbitrarily-selected words end in an extremely common sound. In other news, dog bites man.
[2] All of them, you mean? No non-lunatic theory. Amerind comes close, though, excluding only the Na-Dene and Eskimo-Aleut families, but it's not widely accepted.
[3] What kind of "feature" do you mean? What possible nontrivial reason could there be for placenames to end a particular vowel which could be traced back to a protolanguage? There's no distinct morpheme involved. Could you be talking about some very general phonological feature, like a preference for open final syllables?

[Viktor77]

[1] I would only say that if this just boils down to the fact that [ i] just happens to be one of the most prevalent of vowels (like [a]) and that's why so many Native American words end in it, could there be more to that? [2] Has there ever been a theory posited that unites the languages of North America? [3] Perhaps then it is a feature that goes back to a proto-language that has been remarkably strong because of the tenseness of [ i ], much like 'tu' in Indo-European languages.

[1] Sure, there could be, but the evidence presented so far gives us no reason at all suspect that there is. A subset of arbitrarily-selected words end in an extremely common sound. In other news, dog bites man.
[2] All of them, you mean? No non-lunatic theory. Amerind comes close, though, excluding only the Na-Dene and Eskimo-Aleut families, but it's not widely accepted.
[3] What kind of "feature" do you mean? What possible nontrivial reason could there be for placenames to end a particular vowel which could be traced back to a protolanguage? There's no distinct morpheme involved. Could you be talking about some very general phonological feature, like a preference for open final syllables?

Not all of them, of course, but your point [3] explains what I mean. This is a general phonological feature of a proto-language that might at least unite Iroquoian, Algic, and Muscogean languages. It might've been an old suffix, or the languages just share this tendency for open final syllables, especially in , [a] and however <au> was pronounced.

But I'm rather uneducated when it comes to Native American languages. I couldn't personally posit my own idea of a relationship between them.

[linguoboy]

Not all of them, of course, but your point [3] explains what I mean. This is a general phonological feature of a proto-language that might at least unite Iroquoian, Algic, and Muscogean languages.

Along with, what, half of the world's languages? A preference for open syllables is extremely common worldwide. (Thus the qualifier "nontrivial".)

[zompist]

Viktor, I suggest going over the lists Boşkoventi provided and count how many endings there are. It sure looked to me like there weren't that many.

(What struck me (but I didn't make an actual count) was the number ending in -(o)ag or similar-- which does correspond to an Algonquian ending, though I'm not sure that's what it always is.)

[CatDoom]

[2] All of them, you mean? No non-lunatic theory. Amerind comes close, though, excluding only the Na-Dene and Eskimo-Aleut families, but it's not widely accepted.

Honestly, I would classify Amerind as one of the lunatic theories. For a bit of perspective, most books on the indigenous languages of California propose that seven different language families were spoken within the state prior to the arrival of Europeans. Of these, one (Yukian) has been challenged on and off due to the relatively distant relationship between Yuki and Wappo, another (Penutian) is on pretty shaky ground, and some of its subfamilies are probably not actually genetically related to one another, and a third (Hokan) is even weaker, and has progressively shrunk over the years as more in-depth analyses of the available data have been attempted.

Amerind attempts to not only lump all but one of these families together (pre-Colombian California had some Athabaskan speakers), but also combine them with everything from Siouan to Oto-Manguean to Mura-Matanawi. That's a pretty bold claim, to put it mildly, and one that would require a whole lot more evidence to back it up than what Greenburg and his ilk have ever been able to provide.

[Salmoneus]

That means that Greenburg might have been wrong; it doesn't mean that Greenburg was insane.

Besides, it's true the proposal lacks adequate linguistic evidence; but then, you can't prove it's false either. Having an opinion on something where there's inadequate evidence to come to a robust conclusion is not insane.

Plus, Greenburg was almost certainly right. With the possible exception of a few relict populations (eg on Tierra del Fuego), the entire population of the Americas (other than the Na-Dene and Inuit, of course) strongly appears to be descended from a population of only a couple of thousand very closely related people (living in a small but open plain, and migratory) living some 15,000 years ago. Given the tiny population size and the environment, it's likely that these people spoke one language, or at most a couple of closely related (genetically and/or through areal influence and loans) languages, and the fact of mass-migration would be likely to further reduce any language differences at that time. It seems extremely plausible, then, that at least the vast majority of Amerind languages do indeed belong to an Amerind language family (though it is of course possible that the occasional tribe might have wandered over the ice or sea at some point in the last 10,000 years, and retained their language - however, given the context this does not seem likely to have been a major source of population, and indeed they would have had to have been small groups so as not to influence the genetics much). Furthermore, genetic evidence suggests a fundamental split between northern and south/central (and possibly some northern coastal) populations, corresponding to Greenburg's primary split within Amerind.

[zompist]

Unfortunately, "this really ought to be a language family because of stuff completely outside linguistics" is not convincing.

On the plus side, Greenberg wasn't making that kind of argument at all; he was applying (basically) a bunch of eyeballing and making rough comparisons. Which is fine, except that he (and even more so Ruhlen) pissed off people by implying that that was all you needed.

Amerindian languages are really really diverse. There are some obvious families, and those have been worked out pretty well (e.g. Algonquian). But stuff that looks good at a first glance, like Quechumaran, turn out to be almost entirely unsupported.

You can of course hope that Greenberg was "right", but in general being right for the wrong reasons is not that impressive. Newton was "right" about light coming in "corpuscles", but he did not actually observe photons or come up with a good theory of photons. It's interesting for historians of science, but it doesn't really make him "more right" than those who believed the wave theory.