[Aztlan] Southeastern US/Mesoamerican language contacts

[Robert Hall]

Nick and Mike,
     I agree that precautions are necessary. Quite a few years back I was working in a fairly isolated former Indian mission town in Venezuela. One of the residents knew that I was making a special note of distinctive local usages of words and expressions. He began bringing me some real puzzlers, words that seemed to be in an archaic Spanish. The excitement waned when I discovered that he was picking words from a Latin Bible that he recognized as being cognate with Spanish words he knew.
     One of the genuine, I feel, substrates of mythic themes in the New World relate to the constellation Orion, which widely turns up in connection with stories about individuals who have lost a body part. For Greek Orion it was an eye. For Egyptian Osiris it was his penis. For the Navajo it was a scalp. For the Crow and Hidatsa it was a hand. In South America it was a leg. Though I know of no explicit connection with Orion, I would add to this list Tezcatlipoca. Tezcatliopoca lost his foot to the crocodilian Cipactli, who in turn lost his lower jaw, just as one of a set of South American twins lost his leg to a crocodilian, who in turn lost his lower jaw. The leg became Orion, the jaw the Hyades. Bob Hall

--- On Fri, 8/28/09, Nick Hopkins <nickhopkins at live.com> wrote:


From: Nick Hopkins <nickhopkins at live.com>
Subject: RE: [Aztlan] Southeastern US/Mesoamerican language contacts
To: michaelruggeri at mac.com, "Robert Hall" <robertleonardhall at sbcglobal.net>
Cc: "Aztlan" <aztlan at lists.famsi.org>
Date: Friday, August 28, 2009, 2:51 PM




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Good stories do get around.  In the 1960s I recorded a version of Oedipus told by a monolingual speaker of Chuj (a Mayan language in NW Guatemala), and it matched the original right down to the riddle that had to be solved to win the bride (What walks on four legs in the morning...).  And incorporated into the Coyote-Rabbit trickster tales were the episodes that we know of as the Br'er Rabbit stories, originally African tales (like Tar Baby).  (BTW I don't think these go back to an ancient common origin.)         


Nick Hopkins

> From: michaelruggeri at mac.com
> To: robertleonardhall at sbcglobal.net
> Date: Fri, 28 Aug 2009 14:36:19 -0500
> CC: aztlan at lists.famsi.org
> Subject: Re: [Aztlan] Southeastern US/Mesoamerican language contacts
> 
> Robert,
> 
> I agree that much of this mythology has its roots far back into the 
> hunting/gathering past in the Americas. The stories are very ancient 
> and traveled through the Americas at a very early time. I believe that 
> some of these mythologies were brought by hunting/gathering shaman all 
> the way from Asia and the myths were then fleshed out by later peoples 
> already familiar with the main concepts behind the ancient myths. That 
> would explain a lot of the strange similarities between tales told 
> north of the Rio Grande and those in Mesoamerica.
> 
> Mike Ruggeri




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