siOBX; - Smithsonian Institution

SWANTON] CHOCTAW SOCIAL AND CEEEMONIAL LIFE 87
NOTES
In my diagrams illustrative of Chickasaw relationship terms ^^^
I gave the term pok nakni (or ipok nakni) as that applied by a
woman to the husband of the mother's brother's daughter. This
may have been stated by an informant but it is evident that it should
be iyup, as in Choctaw and as Morgan has it. In my Chickasaw
and Creek lists I have used the stem of each term of relationship,
omitting the pronominal prefixes, but in the present lists I have
decided to include them, all the more since it develops that the kind
of prefix used varies with the term. Incidentally the stem of
i°ki, father, should evidently have been given as °ki instead
of Ivi. I assumed the " was the sign of the indirect object but
the Creek form Iki shows that it belongs to the stem because
there is a shift from 1 to n in Choctaw. The oldest brother
was called itichapa, "the father's mate" (see p. 196), and would
seem to be equivalent to the term "ancestor" in the loosest sensie
in which Ave employ it. Imafo was also employed for the
father's sister's husband and sometimes for the father's sister's
daughter's husband. In Chickasaw ippokni is given to the father's
sister herself and to her female descendants indefinitely, in which
particular it is unlike Choctaw. It is true that a Choctaw woman
does employ this term for her father's sister and sometimes for her
father's sister's daughter, but a new term i°hukni is used by males
and it sometimes extends to the father's sister's daughter. The next
generation in either case becomes brothers and sisters. The words
for father and mother were similarly extended to the brothers of the
former and the sisters of the latter and we know from Morgan's
tables that they extended to the father's father's brother's sons, the
father's father's father's brother's son's sons, the mother's mother's
sister's daughter, and the mother's mother's mother's sister's daughter's
daughter. It is probable that they took in all of the men and
women of the band, of the corresponding generation, and perhaps
those of the moiety of the father and mother respectively. Moreover,
the term for father had, as we have just seen, a still wider extension.
It was applied to the mother's sister's husband, the father's sister's
son, and sometimes to the husband of the father's sister's daughter,
while the term for mother was given to the wives of these men. It is
evident, however, that these other terms are derived from the usage
of i"ki and ishki for own father and mother, because the other uses
are often qualified by the diminutive, as i°kosi, ishkosi, or the word
toba, " to make," " to become," and sometimes the postposition pila,
" toward."
'3a Forty-fourth Ann. Kept. Bur. Amer. Ethnol., p. ]S6.