Eskimo

earlier Esquimawes, plural, probably borrowed from Spanish esquimaos, borrowed from Innu-aimun (Algonquian language of Quebec and Labrador), attested in the 17th century as aiachkimeȣ-, aiachtchimeȣ- "Micmac," in the 20th century as ayassime·w (phonemicized) "Micmac, Inuk," perhaps literally, "snowshoe-netter"; later Eskimo probably borrowed from French Esquimau, borrowed from Innu-aimun

Note: The history of the appellation Eskimo is in its early stages murky, in its later stages a cause of controversy. Its first attestation in any language is in English, as Esquimawes in Richard hakluyt's Discourse of Western Planting (1584), a secret report sent to Queen Elizabeth forcefully advocating English colonization of North America, which was not printed until 1877. The ethnic identity of Hakluyt's "Esquimawes of the Grande Bay [the waters west of the Strait of Belle Isle]" is impossible to determine from his notice. There is little doubt, though, that his source for the word was Spanish, as fishermen and whalers from the Spanish Basque Provinces frequented the Strait of Belle Isle from about 1540. The Spanish word is directly attested in the Compendio historial de …Guipúzcoa (1625) by the Basque historian Lope Martínez de Isasti, who clearly distinguishes between the esquimaos, who attacked the whalers with bow and arrow, and the montañeses (presumably the Montagnais/Innu people of eastern Canada), with whom the whalers had friendly relations. The designation first appears in French as Esquimaux on a map by Samuel de champlain (1632), placed on the north shore of "La grande baye." The source of the Spanish and French words is likely a word in the Algonquian language of the Innu, recorded variably in the seventeenth century as aiachkimeȣ- (phonemically a·yaskyime·w) and aiachtchimeȣ- (a·yasčime·w), that designates not the Inuit but rather the Micmac, an Eastern Algonquian-speaking people who lived to the south of the Innu. In modern Innu-aimun (the language of the Innu), however, ayassime·w is used along the western shore of the Gulf of St. Lawrence to refer to the Micmac, but further east and along the Labrador coast to refer to the Inuit. The literal meaning of ayassime·w and its cognates in other Algonquian languages has traditionally been taken to be "eaters of raw flesh" (according to the 1933 supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary, from "Proto-Algonquian *ašk- raw, *-imo eat"). This hypothesis was effectively refuted by José Mailhot ("L'étymologie de «Esquimau» revue et corrigée," Études Inuit Studies, vol. 2, no. 2 [1978], pp. 59-69); she proposes that the original meaning was "speaker of an alien language"—hence the name could be applied to either Inuktitut or Micmac, which, though Algonquian, was not comprehensible to the Innu. The American linguist Ives Goddard rejects her explanation and sees ayassime·w as a reduplicated form of assime·w "she nets a snowshoe," whence, as an agentive derivative, "snowshoe-netter" (Handbook of North American Indians, vol. 5, Arctic [Washington, 1984], pp. 5-6).