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Reader Response: A Critique of the Swenson/McCafferty Linguistic Analysis of The Word "Chicago"
Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, Summer 2004 by Weber, Carl J
The origins of place names hold particular fascination for many of us. Curiosity about the origin of "Chicago" has had a lively history. Theories of the "true" origins of Chicago's name have passed in and out of history like so many fashions. The three theories that have had their strongest adherents are "skunk," "great," and "smelly onion" (or "garlic"/"leek").
The etymological theory that in current history entertains the most conspicuous rank is the "smelly onion" theory. The theory is likely to be offered with curious, if not wry, amusement. Yet, the historic truth, behind the humor, is that the smelly onion theory wobbles on the feeblest historical underpinnings and, for lack of a more apt characterization, is linguistically absurd.
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John E Swenson1 and Michael McCafferty2 have published articles supporting the smelly onion theory. The Swenson/McCafferty claim is that the original name of the city was "Chicagoua." It was the regular Indian word for "skunk." But it was not only the word for "skunk"-it was also a word used, because of the association, for a certain repulsively smelling plant in the onion family, the Allium tricoccum.
At the center of the problem is the "skunk" word, "Chicagoua," ends with the sound of the letter "a." It is true that in some of the languages related to the Miami/Illinois, the terminal "a" dropped away. In Miami / Illinois, it did not. More technically, we are discussing the terminal morpheme-the singular animate gender marker. The "-a" was sounded, heard, and, as McCafferty says, should have been written. The fact that 99.9% of the time it was not written is sufficient to disqualify the theory.
McCafferty was aware of the dilemma and the challenge faced by the smelly onion theory. He could see that Swenson's brand of linguistics exposed a gaping wound in the smelly onion defense. Swenson seems to have thought that, at the end of "Chicagoua," the "a" was really there, so to speak, but that it was, simply, not heard by the French ear. This rule, applicable to some of the related language families, was not applicable to the Miami/Illinois.
Swenson, not having consulted with experts, sensed nothing wrong with his onions word having only "-ou" at the end. He did not know the "a" sotmd at the end of the skunk/onion word was present. Swenson sweeps away the question, "Why wasn't the "-a" sound written down?" He states, the "-a" was "conventionally dropped."3
McCafferty, an academic linguist, cannot allow the "conventionally dropped" explanation to stand, and he rightfully says, "there is no linguistic basis for such a notion."4 Accordingly, McCafferty provides another account for why the "-a" was not present in 99.9 per cent of the examples that have come down to us. He knew that to save the smelly onion theory he had to explain why the "-a" was not written. He had to come up with something, and what he came up-published last year-is amazing. But first, a very modest lesson in French/Indian spelling.
The omicron-upsilon, "8," is a Greek digraph character. It shows two letters graphically united into one. In this case, an "o" with a "u" balanced on top. The Jesuit missionaries appropriated this character to the service of representing either of two sounds in the Indian Languages. These sounds were inadequately suggested by any of the Roman alphabet. Linguists have long been of one mind that "8" at the end of a word in these early French studies represents French "ou" (the English vowel in "too"). In defending the smelly onion theory, in "A Fresh Look," McCafferty discovers another use of "8," a use that had for the past few hundred years been overlooked.
McCafferty explains:
"Thus, given the fact that the 8 could be rewritten as oua [i.e., the fact of his own newly discovered theory], there loomed over the uninformed and unsuspecting scribes, such as La Salle, the royal hydrographer Jean-Baptiste Louis Franquelin, whom the emplorer employed, and in fact everyone else in La Salle's linguistically challenged troupe, the possibility that they would unintentionally create ambiguous or nonsenical terms."5
His "fact," i.e., his new interpretation of "8, " has yet to be tested.6
McCafferty assaults La Salle for his garbled, ambiguous, nonsensical spelling of the Chicago word. McCafferty acknowledges, nonetheless, that he, himself, does not actually know how La Salle spelled the word! The information is available-he spelled it "Checagou."7
Written assaults against La Salle date from the 187Os. They were initiated by J.G. Shea, who attacked Pierre Margry, the French archivist.8 Margry claimed certain documents showed that La Salle had, in fact, been to the Mississippi before Jolliet and Marquette, in 1673. Given the (1) context of La Salle's life, (2) the need for an explanation about his "missing periods," (3) documents found by Margry, and (4) the Ellington Stone (in the Quincy Illinois Museum) with the year 1671 inscribed on it-La Salle may have, in fact, been the first to partially navigate the Mississippi. Shea said that Margry's documents about La Salle where hoaxes and frauds, and that they were motivated by anti-Jesuit sentiment.9
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