The tribes who populated Ohio before permanent settlement by Europeans—the Delaware, Erie, Miami, Huron, and Shawnee, among others—lacked written languages and, thus, standardized spellings. White explorers and settlers transcribed their words in higgledy-piggledy fashion: Chalakatha (or Chalahgawtha) became Chillicothe; Pekowi was transformed into Piqua and Pickaway; mshkikwam evolved into Muskingum; and so on.
The name of Ohio's longest interior waterway—the Scioto River—is a particularly interesting example of this phenomenon. Even though anglicized (and, one presumes, simplified from its original form), its spelling differs slightly from its pronunciation. Residents of towns and neighborhoods named for the river can be forgiven for their ire when non-Ohioans, having never heard of the stream, mispronounce it as "skee-OH-toe."
Sandy Nestor's Indian Placenames in America describes the meaning of Scioto, but fails to provide a spelling (or pronunciation) for the word from which it was derived:
It is a Shawnee word meaning 'hairy,' descriptive of the shedded hair from herds of deer that drank from the river. It was also interpreted as 'deer.'Thomas Aquinas Burke, in Ohio Lands: A Short History, uses the spelling scionto, while Wikipedia prefers skɛnǫ·tǫ’ (which I'll transliterate as skenno-toh). According to The Wilderness Trail, "[e]arly forms of the name applied to the Scioto River included Souyote, Sonnioto, Sonontio, Cenioteaux, St. Yotoc [ha!], Chianotho, and Sikader." The corruption of the final vowel in Scioto (from "oh" to "uh"), evidently, began well before Ohio received its first settlers—indeed, well before the American colonies broke from Britain!
In the 18th and early 19th centuries, travelers and mapmakers disagreed about the proper way of writing Scioto. Joel Barlow's 1785 map of the Northwest Territory uses Scioto, the modern spelling, but Thomas Hutchins (1778) and Guy Johnson (1762) write Sioto, and Noah Webster (1806) labels the river Siota. Prince Carl Bernhard's Travels Through North America, During the Years 1825 and 1826 (admittedly a translated work) misspells Scioto as Sciota.
The currently accepted spelling, Scioto, was likely determined on March 24, 1803, when the Ohio legislature formed Scioto County from Adams County. Had the First Ohio General Assembly chosen Sciota (or another variant) instead of Scioto, our state would seem a very different place, indeed. (I write with the utmost sarcasm.)
The meaning and attribution given for Scioto is totally incorrect. "Skioto" is an IROQUOIAN word, from "skionto," which is the Wendat and Mohawk word for 'deer.' Many places were named "skionto" or a variation on maps of the area that date from after the Iroquoian invasion. This name REPLACED the Shawnee name of the river, which is given as "Chianotho" on a Virginia map of 1755. "Chianotho" (Shawnotho) derives from the Shawnee name and likely meant 'Shawnee clan," from a time when the Shawnee were one among many Algonquian tribes of the region.
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