> As it happens, 'moose' is an Abenaki word (which 'red-tailed hawk'
> presumably isn't). Quite why they chose to use that instead of the
> perfectly good English word 'elk' - or, for that matter, why they
> chose to call a completely new animal an 'elk' is another question...
>
Well, Moose and Abenaki both lived in parts of the country where they mostly encountered Francophone colonists, and the Frenchies at the time were a lot less crazy for preserving the glorious French language than today. So, Moose slipped into French vernacular, I'm guessing, and the English have a long and storied of mugging French for vocabulary, and thus, The Alekki! wait, no, the Moose.
Si8mo, or Hawk, is harder to pronounce, obviously, and thus why we don't have any softball teams named The Si8mos. Ditto with Wapiti, which is why they became the mighty Elk!
The real questions we should be asking is what the God-Learners called the Alekki and Pralori. Are the Alekki such a small tribe because all their great myths and ancestors were shoved into the Pralori mythology, because the God-Learners knew what an Elk was, by God, and they weren't it?
Ian
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