Interestingly the gaelic expression for "my shoes" is mo casain (or something like that) which is pronounced almost exactly like the red indian "moccassin", suggesting that the earliest lingual exchanges between our cultures were between the gaels and the red injuns.

During a Gaidhlig clas today, we did a letter from Leabhar nan Litricheacn (litir 90). Basically it explained very well how this came about (Mocassin). Plenty of Indian tribes only contact with whites would have been with Gaels (As in other areas of North America only with the French or English speakers), there are plenty of cases where Indians also learned and spoke Gaidhlig and sackloads of cases of intermarrying. The letter explains that an Englishman who was something of an anthropoligist came accross some Indians whose only previous contact had been with Gaidhlig speakers, the Englishman on noticing the Indians brightly coloured shoes pointed to his feet and asked what they were called, and got the Gaidhlig answer "mo chasan" back because the Gaidhlig speaking Indian assumed the Englishmans tongue was just a funny form of Gaidhlig (white mans language) that hed never heard before which kinda makes sense. To this day the Mic Mac people (Red Indian) of Nova Scotia speak Gaidhlig.
Co aig a fios, who knows.

There are a number of problems with this, Neilly.

1. As mentioned before - dates. You don't give a date for this letter you mention, but, as has already pointed out on this thread, the first appearance of 'moccasin' (as 'Mekezin') in English is 1609, in an English translation of a French work: Nova Francia. We're dealing with a very tight time-frame for the word to move from Gaelic to a number of Native American languages (the form we have comes from Powhatan but closely related words are known in Narragansett, Micmac and Massachusett) and to replace whatever term those languages already had for 'shoe'. Also, I'm unsure how you can state that "Plenty of Indian tribes only contact with whites would have been with Gaels." Cognates of 'Mocassin' are know from related Native languages across large parts of North America (of which more below).

2. Any story that includes phrases like: "The Englishman asked what they were called ..." has got to be treated with caution (see, for example, folk etymologies for 'Canada' and 'Kangaroo'). A statement like: "because the Gaidhlig speaking Indian assumed the Englishmans tongue was just a funny form of Gaidhlig" begs the question, 'How can we possibly know what the Gaidhlig-speaking Indian assumed?' Anyway, as noted above, the word came into English via French - see the OED.

3. In the Massachusett language, 'Mokussinash' was the word for 'shoes', and the singular form was 'Mokus' ('shoe'). It's vanishingly unlikely that a loan phrase would be slotted into the native grammar structures in that way - and the singular form is moving still further away from the phonological coincidence of 'mo chassan'.

As I've said before, I'm not 'dissing' Gaidhlig, I'm just pointing out that etymology is a science (albeit an inexact one), and romantic notions can't go unchallenged and uncorrected - that would be patronizing in the extreme. ;)

Hi John,

I don't know a lot about the etymology of that particular word, but I do know how to tell good linguistic arguments from bad.

It's always tempting to jump on a similarity between two words (or short phrases) in two different languages which have similar meanings, and proclaim that you've "proved" that they're related or that there was contact between speakers much earlier than anybody knew. These things are always worth checking out – we'd never discover anything if people didn't follow up hunches. But in order to convince the academic world, you need a lot more than that – you can't just sit back and rewrite history on the basis of three similar-sounding syllables.

As I understand it, the claim here is for a single borrowing, rather than a genetic relationship (i.e. Powhatan and Gaelic descended from the same ancestor language – a claim which would require a lot of evidence!) This at least reduces the standard of proof required somewhat. But just finding a word that sounds similar could, as has apparently been pointed out, just be a coincidence. This is the "null hypothesis" – the default assumption which must be assumed in the absence of sufficient evidence for any of the others. Let's think about how else we could explain the resemblance. What does the claim involve?

"Moccasin" has, as was pointed out, cognates all across Eastern Algonquian – it's not a word that's pecular to Powhatan. This means either:

(a) contact a very long time ago between Gaelic speakers and speakers of the proto-language which eventually became Powhatan (spoken in Virginia), Massachusett (spoken, surprise surprise, in Massachusetts – 500 miles away from the Powhatans), and Micmac (southern boundary Massachusetts but extending hundreds of miles north of there);

(b) Gaelic-speakers in North America more recently, but with a very wide distribution and enough people in each of the relevant places to have an effect on the language;

(c) word introduced in Virginia (where documented in 1609, it seems) and spread like absolute wildfire throughout the widely scatted Algonquian tribes, eventually ending up being used everywhere between Nova Scotia and Virginia (about 1000 miles overland);

or (d) it's just a coincidence. Let's examine the likelihood of each of these in turn.

(a) Proto-Algonquian is thought to have been spoken 2,500-3,000 years ago. At this time, Proto-Celtic was (probably) just starting to emerge as a separate language. Europe was at this time in the Iron Age, and certainly in no shape to be sailing across the Atlantic. If they went overland, they'd need to walk all the way across Siberia, over the Bering Bridge to Alaska and all the way to the opposite side of North America without leaving any traces of their presence along the way. I think this idea can safely be dismissed as fantasy.

(b) Thousands of Gaels stretching 1000 miles from Virgina to Nova Scotia? We would know about this. It would require half the population of the Highlands and Islands to have gone across with the very first colonists. If this happened, why aren't there 100 Gaelic words in the Algonquian languages instead of just this one? And why isn't there a sizeable Gaelic-speaking community in Virginia today? Why, for that matter, isn't Gaelic the official language of the USA?

Lots of Gaels did, of course, move to Nova Scotia, but that was about 150 years after the word "moccasin" is recorded in Powhatan.

(c) The most obvious reason for this to happen would be if the Algonquians didn't have shoes until they first met a white person, who happend to be a Gael. You can imagine the exchange: "What are those on your feet, paleface?" "My shoes" (mo chasan) "Moccasin, eh? They look useful. Can you make me a pair?" Such a brilliant new idea would be bound to catch on quickly, and they'd be likely to use the foreign word for it as they wouldn't already have one.

But is there any evidence to suggest the Algonquians didn't have shoes before the white man showed up? And if Algonquian shoes were based on European ones, why did Lescarbot (the writer of Nova Francia) consider moccasins so different from European shoes that he used the Algonquian word to describe them? Also, we need independent evidence of pre-1609 Gaelic presence in New England or SE Canada – where is it?

If the reason the word spread so quickly is something other than a previous lack of shoes among Algonquians, why aren't there more Gaelic words in Algonquian?

(d) How likely is this to be just a coincidence? Actually, quite likely. A man named Mark Rosenfelder (webname Zompist) has explained this much better than I could, so I'll simply link you to two articles of his. They're fairly long but his style is nice and colloquial.

http://zompist.com/chance.htm

http://zompist.com/proto.html

On the point of semantic leeway (mentioned in the first article), I should mention that, as far as I can work out using online dictionaries, mo chasan means not "my shoes" but "my feet". This isn't a million miles away, but it's not as close as your opponents were making out.