Going OT (yes, again) was Re: "The People" was: New guy

> (a little humor/humour there since the

Hi Mark!

I 'conveniently ignored' that angle (Father is Cherokee stock mixed with Irish
and French and mother is Spanish blended with Scots, Dutch,
and German-Jew) for simplicity's sake.

Besides it easier to type then "Algonquian-Athapascan-26 other names" at
least one model of North American languages showed in a 1974 Atlas I have.
<grin> Even the simple "Six language group" model seemed too long to type out
for ther sake of a little humor. I am not unaware as much as lazy.

Except, until recently, the majority of the First Americans (My kids from
India are Indians, not my father, and anyone born in American is a "native"
American so I don't really like either of those terms but we have had that
discussion before...) did not see themselves as one people.
 I won't even start to unravel which/how many language groups (much less
languages) there were before Columbus 'discovered' his world model might not
to scale. The Cherokees helped Andrew Jackson against the Creeks
(20/20 hindsight - saving his life may not have been such a good act <no
grin>) and there is still some hostility to this day between certain groups of
Apaches for the aid they rendered against other Apaches. One
common theme/weakness was the inability to rise above the history of
cultural/tribal/nation conflict when the Europeans came to occupy the
land and present a united front. I would go so far as to say that it was
basically impossible (outside of fiction) for the First Americans to unify
against Europe's colonialism precisely because they did not see themselves as
one people.

And it seems that each group's name for it self (not the name someone else
gave them which is where at least a portion of names main line Americans came
to know many groups by came from) translates as some variety of "The People"
with some implication of 'best' or 'main' included in many cases.

But now we are way off topic. I could try and link this back to GZG FH... but
I'll just stop.