"*Inoka" or "Inoka:" an Internet Troll or Gag

Abstract: A notion that is widely promoted on the web but not made in scholarly print publications is that not "Illinois" but rather "Inoka" (or as it is sometimes more correctly spelled, "*Inoka") is the native Illinois people's name for themselves.¹  The expression never appeared in print until it was constructed in 2000.²

"Illinois," on the other hand, is documented on hundreds of pages in dozens of historical documents published before, say, 1776.  Many of these uses explictly refer to the Illinois' name for themselves and their nation. Variations of this name are also used by other Native people, especially other Algonquians, to refer to the Illinois.

The only published primary liguistic material on which the construct "*Inoka" or "Inoka" is based is the expression "e no kx" glossed as 'Indian'  in a hymn in an 1835 First Wea Reading Book. However, of this document, one linguist says that "its value as a source of information on Miami-Illinois is limited," that the author's "command of Miami-Illinois grammar" was "inferior," and that "one cannot help but wonder if many of his Wea-speaking audience could even understand his longer sentences."³

Otherwise, the 2000 construct is based totally on the interpretation of handwriting and spelling found in two obscure unpublished manuscripts and in a third manuscript transcribed and privately published in 2002. The first manuscript, often associated with Pierre-François Pinet, has been described as "a messy jumble of data" with with many errors, omissions, and "idiosyncracies of transcription" probably by a group of Jesuit missionaries just "learning the language."⁴ That manuscript appears to contain the phrase "ilinois in gre  in8ka" with a line drawn over the "gre."

Of the revison of this manuscript, often associated with Antoine-Robert LeBoullenger, it is said that "so many of Pinet's errors were carried over into LeBoullenger's dictionary, and since LeBoullenger seems to have generated many scribal errors of his own, it is quite possible that LeBoullenger did not yet have much experience with the language when he wrote it out."⁵  That manuscript contains multiple occurances of "inoca" in dealing with the Illinois geography and language, but it does not anywhere contain the word "Inoca" or any other word beginning with a capital 'I'. What we would spell "Illinois" or "Iroquois" or "Image" is spelled "Jllinois" or "Jroquois" or "Jmage." In the alphabetical listing of entries, the entry dealing with the Illinois people, "Jllinois," comes after entries for the common French words "Jamais" and "Janvier." It is clear that the initial letter of the expression is not intended to be read as, interpreted as or treated as an 'I'. The statement widely circulated on the web that "Inoca" appears in the LeBoullenger manuscript is simply not correct. It might be noted that the only gloss of any form of the "Jnoca" (or as the most widely cited student of the manuscript transcribes it, "Jnsca") expression is an error. The expression is explictly purported to be plural, but the gloss is singular "je Suis Jllin." or " I Am Illin[ois]."

The third manuscript, transcribed and published in 2002  as the Kaskaskia Illinois-toFrench Dictionary⁶, mentions two expressions dealing with Illinois people, "Masc8tea," glossed as "Ilinois peuple"⁷ and "In8ca," glossed as "Ilinois. peuple."⁸ However, the two terms "caskaski8a' and "caskaskia" were glossed as "nation Ilinoise, Les Kaskaskias," because it is, after all, a dictionary of the Kaskaskia language.⁹

The modern observation that the first two of these manuscripts seem to be by people just trying to learn the language is born out by history. Newly arrived missionaries were given the task of compiling pages of notes on the Native languages to try to learn the language and help others to do the same. But those notes proved to be of little value; "[l]earning these languages from written works alone proved to be impossible, although the earliest manuscripts were intended for such use."¹⁰

However, a 2007 internet newsletter posting was to "supersede the discussion of the name ‘Illinois’" the author previously offered and argue that "Inoka" (or "*Inoka") proves that "virtually all analyses of the name ‘Illinois’ offered over the past 300 years are in fact wrong," nothing more than "folk etymology" and "urban-legend-level ‘scholarship.’"¹¹

In a note to the 2007 internet posting the author discussed attestations (that is, the expressions literally appearing in the historic records) on which the hypothetical "phonemic form of '*inoka' is based."¹²  He used the asterisk to indicate that "*Inoka" was an unattested hypothetical construct. (From Wikipedia: "In historical linguistics, an asterisk immediately before a word indicates that the word is not directly attested, but has been reconstructed on the basis of other linguistic material…")

With that in mind, wording of  the statement that routinely appears in Wikipedia that "Inoka" is attested in three dictionaries has all the earmarks of a gag aimed at those who are unfamiliar with the history of the modern hypothetical construct, and, for that matter, the nature of the two sets of student notes purported to be "dictionaries."

Along those same lines, no linguists have offered  in any mainstream scholarly publication any significant discussion of the notion that "Inoka" or "*Inoka" invalidates 300 years of sound, respected documentation and study of "Illinois." Consequently that notion, which continues to appear occasionally in internet postings, blogs, Wikipedia pages and occasional other web pages, could well be considered little more than an internet troll.

Notes

1. Costa, David. "Illinois." In Victor Golla, ed., SSILA Newsletter, 2007- January, 9-12.
2. Costa, David. "Miami-Illinois Tribe Names." In John Nichols, ed., Papers of the Thirty-first Algonquian Conference, 30-53. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba, 2000.
3. Costa, David. The Miami-Illinois language (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2003), 17.
4. Costa, David. David Costa, "The St.-Jerome Dictionary of Miami-Illinois," Papers of the 36th Algonquian Conference, ed. H.C. Wolfart (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba, 2005), 133, 126.
5. Costa, 2005, 131-132. Costa's unfavorable assessment of of the manuscript is very much in line with that of other linguists.  In 1865 the publisher of the Jesuit Relations (that is, documents of the early French missionaries/explorers of Illinois) began a very optimistic and enthusiastic effort to transcribe and study the Boullenger manuscript. But after the first eight or nine pages of that effort were reviewed by Wilberforce Eames, John Wesley Powell, James Constantine Pilling, and John Gilmary Shea the effort was abandoned. In the twentieth century the Smithsonian Institution's Bureau of American Ethnology began a similarly enthusiastic study of the manuscript in order to include it in Franz Boas' Handbook of American Indian Languages, but after 20½ pages that project was also abandoned. In 1958 Natalia Belting published a brief study that was intended to be the first in a series of major publications about the manuscript, but that effort was also abandoned.
6. Masthay, Carl, editor. Kaskaskia Illinois-to-French dictionary (St. Louis, MO: C. Masthay, 2002).
7. Masthay, 163.
8. Masthay, 122.
9. Masthay, 90.
10. Hanzeli, Victor Egon, Missionary linguistics in New France; a study of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century descriptions of American Indian languages (The Hague: Mouton, 1969), 46.
11. Costa, 2007, 9-12.
12. Costa, 2007, 11.
 

Jim Fay, Ph.D.
2/23/11