Talk:Ten Bears

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Indigenous peoples of North America

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Comanche name[edit]

There are three competing forms of this name:

The calque of his name in English: Ten Bears
The Anglicized version of his name used in English language texts: Paruasemʉno
The Comanche version of his name as spoken in Comanche: Pawʉʉrasʉmʉnurʉ

The infobox is for the name as it appears in the native language, not for the name as it appears in Anglicized form in English. Check out [1]. One of the problems is that modern Comanche is natively spoken by a vanishingly small number of people. The question then arises of whether a native name from a 19th century figure is based on the actual Comanche name at the time or influenced by the anglicization of that name over the last century. 19th anglicization of Comanche was notoriously bad ('parua' for pawʉʉra 'bear (probably grizzly)', for example). This particular word is further complicated by the fact that the grizzly went extinct and the only term for 'bear' in modern Comanche is the word they borrowed from Osage, wasapeʔ. The most recent Comanche dictionary includes "parua", but it's undoubtedly not based on a continuous tradition of use from the 19th century language, but a reappropriation from a form found in poor 19th century sources. If you look at Rejon's superior transcription, you don't find anything close to "parua", but you do find wʉʉra. Canonge records neither "parua" nor wʉʉra because by the 1950s the only term for "bear" was wasapeʔ. --Taivo (talk) 16:33, 26 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

It might also be mentioned that his name is anglicized as "Parra-Wa-Samen" by Dee Brown in Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.

AnthonyTF (talk) 20:10, 17 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Dee Brown is hardly an authority on the Comanche language ;) --Taivo (talk) 21:19, 17 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]