A fresh look at the place name Chicago

Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, Summer 2003 by McCafferty, Michael

The fact that La Salle's has an instead of the i we find in is not a problem. Historic French speakers who had little or no experience with the Miami-Illinois language often heard i, which is the correct vowel sound in the Miami-Illinois place name, as the sound written e by linguists. The work of Constantin-Francois Chasseboeuf Volney, an educated French tourist who visited the United States in the late 1700s, is a readily accessible source that consistently exhibits the mishearing of e for i.15 (The e is the sound represented by ay in English "say," although, again, the Miami-Illinois sound does not have a diphthong as does its English equivalent. In modern French e is written e(e), but French writers of La Salle's era, as we see in his , often did not put an accent mark on this vowel.) At the same time, Henri Joutel, one of La Salle's followers, is responsible for a spelling of this same place name in the form . Joutel's spelling with clearly indicates a Miami-Illinois origin for the word.16

The real problem with La Salle's is the final . This sound, written u by linguists and ou in French, does not occur at the end of nouns in Miami-Illinois, the local Algonquian language that the source noun sikuokwa comes from.17 is then an incorrect spelling for this native place name. La Salle, or the transcriber of his reports, should have written *Checagoua. In other words, the term should have an a on the end of it.

In his attempt to explain the absence of final a in , an a that should be there as he correctly concluded, Swenson thought that it was because the Frenchman had failed to hear the final a in the original Miami-Illinois term.18 This is incorrect. There is no linguistic basis for such a notion. In this particular phonological context in Miami-Illinois, that is, when the sound wa preceded by a consonant occurs at the end of a word, the final a is never dropped in the pronunciation of the term. In this specific way the historical development of Miami-Illinois resembles that of Fox, one of its closest sister languages, rather than that of Ojibwa, another of its closest sister languages. Indeed, Miami-Illinois final a in this situation was always heard and always noted by the many European recorders of the language regardless of their ethnic origins or linguistic abilities.

The lack of final a in La Salle's does not reflect a mistake on the part of a Frenchman's ear, but of his hand. In other words, La Salle's final represents a common but heretofore unrecognized incorrect transliteration of what would have been written originally *Checag8 or *Chicag8. The letter 8, a digraph originally composed of a circle with a crescent on top of it but often written like the number 8, was a shorthand device used extensively, and on an every day basis, by French Jesuit missionaries in the western Great Lakes. However, Europeans in the 1600s and the 1700s did not completely understand for what the letter stood.

Here is the original problem. The Jesuits in the field used the letter 8 rather loosely. But French people with little or no experience with the region's native languages had, based on the evidence, only a limited idea of how the Jesuits were using it, what the letter 8 could actually represent. In fact, Camille de Rochemonteix, a French Jesuit living in France, appears to have been the only French person not on assignment in the New World who knew how Jesuits there were using 8. Folks like La Salle and his French-speaking entourage in both the New World and the Old were certainly aware that 8 could stand for various related native sounds that the French language writes ou or o. But they were clearly unaware that this letter could also represent a sequence of sounds that French in no way can write ou or o. When copying original documents sent from the Illinois Country, those with no experience with native languages invariably rewrote final 8 as ou. This uninformed practice resulted in the attested disfiguration of historical native terms, including La Salle's .