Customer Reviews

Native American Placenames of the United States

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

New in paperback is a college-level reference that is perfect for any serious Native American library: a survey that is the most important place names guide in print. American Indian words define North America: this reference blends history and linguistics with insights from Native speakers across the country, creating a scholarly 'bible' of reference detail key to any comprehensive Native American collection - and now very affordable in its new paperback format.

Diane C. Donovan
California Bookwatch

I was prompted to acquire this work after travelling along "Bohicket Road" south of Charleston, SC, and wondering about the origin of the name. A Google search turned up a page from this book, which looked as though there were entries for every state, including placenames for Washington, California and Idaho, many of which I'm familiar with. That impression was not misplaced. There are, indeed, entries for nearly every state in this 600-page work.

However, some of the entries are...questionable, particularly with certain etymologies. Some are traced to Spanish placenames without explanation (e.g. "Potosí " to a Bolivian mine). In Washington there are unexplained deviations from Chinook jargon to various "Salishan" dialects (e.g., "Chuckanut"), making them hard to accept without additional attestation.

Despite these gaps, I'm happy with my purchase because it is an entertaining and informative work, with wide application.

I rated this book at three stars, and feel generous in doing so. It DOES have a lot of listings, so I guess I shouldn't be too harsh in my review, but I found it dissapointing overall. I currently live in Virginia, where it can be argued that the Native American and English languages have overlapped longer than anywhere on the continent and as might be expected there are numerous place names either derived or taken directly from the native inhabitants. Yet most of those names are not listed in this book at all, and when they are they are either misidentified geographically or unclear as to their history. On the other hand, just readig through the book as I'm inclined to do with any 'encyclopedic' work, I found myself questioning the explanations about how several English sounding names are supposedly derived from native words.

The book does seem much more useful with regard to certain geographic areas, perhaps because the 'experts' who contributed were concentrated in certain areas. And I have to admit that I have spent an hour at a time more than once just browsing through the book out of genuine curiosity, not looking up anything but instead just soaking up the information it contains. Having volunteered that experience, overall I still quite honestly feel that I wasted my money on this thick block of dead tree version, when a quick or maybe a not so quick but more in-depth web search can reveal much of, and in some cases more than, the information contained in this book.