As we all know, historical accounts are full of Native people who are known by translated names such as Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, and so forth, instead of by these names as expressed in their own languages.
How did Europeans get in this habit? I don’t recall personal names being translated for other peoples. Transliterated, yes, but not translated literally into a phrase (such as “son of the land of lakes” for “McLauchlin”).
What were the original names?
My guess is that “Crazy Horse” rolled a little easier off the tongue than “Tashunkewitko” and “Sitting Bull” easier than “Tatanka-Iyotanka.” Compare that against your example. Of course, there was also “Hin-mah-too-yah-lat-kekt,” which translates to “Thunder Rolling Down the Mountain” who we remember as “Chief Joseph” or “Joseph the Younger” (his father, Joseph the Elder, being one of the first Nez Perce to be converted to Christianity).
Of course, there were names that weren’t translated, like Techumseh, Sacagawea and Osceola. It could be that the translations weren’t as “poetic” or that they simply sounded more familiar.
Tasunka Witko and Tatanka Iyotake (or close variations depending on how the words are rendered in the Roman alphabet).
This is an interesting question, since the practice mainly seems to have been applied to Great Plains tribes. The earliest settlers in the east seemed to have used the native names or an approximation: Powhatan, his brother Opechancanough (quite a mouthful), Pocahontas, Massasoit, Samoset, Squanto, etc. In some cases a European-style name was used, as in Massasoit’s son King Philip (Metacomet) or Tecumseh’s brother, "The Prophet " (Tenskwatawa). I’m having a little trouble coming up with a “translated” name east of Illinois (Black Hawk, chief of the Sauk and Fox).
matt, what was the practice in Canada, particularly among the French?
I am not aware of native American names being translated in areas colonized by the Spanish.
I correct myself. There was Mangas Coloradas (Red Sleeves) in Arizona/Mexico.
Then there are many like Wahunsunacock and his daughter Matoaka, who became known by Indian names that weren’t their own (Powhatan and Pocahontas, aka Rebekah Rolfe). And many names for tribes were taken from what other tribes called them (Cheyenne, for example, is Francophilic translation of what the Sioux called the Tsistsistas (which means something like “people like us”, and of course Sioux isn’t correct either).
Where I’m from there were many mixed race chiefs who had Euro names as well as their Indian names and translations. William Weatherford (the son of a Scots trader and a Creek woman named Sehoy), for example, identified far more with his Creek heritage than with his British and preferred Lamochattee, or it’s English translation of Red Eagle (though he also had the title Hopnicafutsahia, which was used only when he was war leader and meant Truth Speaker). His maternal uncle (which in the matrilineal Creek nation was a role far more important than father) was Hoboi-Hilr-Miko, but (to Weatherford’s disgust) he identified almost solely by his own name, Alexander McGillivray.
Place names have much better luck.
[HIJACK] It’s odd the way some things come down to us. I grew up in what’s known as “The Hornet’s Nest” of Creek culture- a midsection of Alabama that was thickly populated for centuries by the Muskogee and for millennia by their ancestors or predecessors. On the farm where I grew up was a steep hill with a granite outcropping that my my old relatives called “Old Nonesuch”. None of them knew why it was called that, it just always had been. Years later I was reading a book on Creek Indian mythologyand was surprised to learn that the homeplace of the Creek deity (Esaugetuh Emissee- spellings vary widely, but it means “Breathmaker”) was known in the Creek dialect as Nunna Chaka (again, spellings vary widely, but it basically means “stone hill house”). I’m convinced that this is the etymology of Old Nonesuch. (My family was in the area before the Creek removal and intermarried with the multiracial Creeks; they also kept animals named Esau, but I think that’s probably coincidental as there are no roosters or bulls in Creek mythology.)[/HIJACK]
Not quite. *Tsistsista *are what the Cheyenne called themselves. The Lakota (Sioux) called then *Sahiela *(they come red).
IANAAnthropologist, but here’s a thought: the Amerind names in question are simply etymologically closer to the spoken language than they are in, say, Europe.
Rachel, for instance, ultimately derives from the Hebrew word for “ewe”. John derives from the Hebrew “yochanan”: “G-d is gracious”. Jonathan is from Hebrew “yehonatan”: “G-d has given”.[1]
Of course, there are plenty of names that you probably just aren’t thinking of as words, even though they’re perfectly standard English. When you hear about the muppet named Prairie Dawn, the context doesn’t lend itself to you hearing the English words rather than a name. Similarly for the French-derived Blanche Dubois, as an example.
It’s still in the general area of what is now the USA, so there may be a “border” factor in this.
Y’know now that y’all mention it – By the 19th century, the Plains Indians in North America were still outsiders across a frontline border, very much “alien” to the whites, who’d likely have a bitch of a time handling some of the names. OTOH in most of Spanish America the whites and Indians were living as different classes within the same society so vocabulary from Nahualt and Quechua and the other native tongues would have become part of the local dialect of Spanish so it would be unremarkable to use those names… and enforced Catholicism would make Christian names the norm anyway for civil purposes.
That’s the only one I could think of right off the bat. Cephas is the Aramaic word for stone. So, Simon got renamed Cephas (stone) and finally Petros (stone). Basically, his name got translated from Cephas to Petros and then the latter was transliterated from then on and thus we call him Peter.
There are several that seem to fit among the Seneca of New York, but since I don’t speak Seneca, I can’t say if they’re really translations of native names: Red Jacket, Half King, Blacksnake, Cornplanter, Handsome Lake.
Mangas Coloradas, who was born in the 1790s, received his name from the Mexicans when his territory in what is now New Mexico was still well inside Mexico.
I couldn’t think of any examples of Native people having their names translated into French; thinking of Native figures encountered by the French, such names as Kondiaronk, Pontiac, Donnacona, and Catherine Tekakwitha came to mind.
(Of course, a number of tribes were given French-language names, such as the Montagnais, Huron, Nez Perce, Coeur d’Alene, Saulteaux, and so forth.)
Another reason for using english translations instead of the original names, might be that during the wars against the prairie indians (middle–later 19th century), generals, gunslingers and indian warriors were already part of legend. People new about and read about gen. Custer, Wild Bill and Sitting Bull while they’re still alive, and the names of those individuals became well known, and it was in the interest of writers and reporters that people back in the city knew about a furious warrior like Crazy Horse, for instance, sounded cooler and was easier to recognize than Tashunke Witko.
And the internet provides the reversal-- a poster signs in as *Wakinyan *instead of Lightning. 
The state of New Jersey is filled with untranslated Indian names – Hackensak, Manalapan, Montoloking, Hopatcong etc. I can’t think of any New Jersey indians from the period of historic contact who had translated names, either – Weequehela, Menakihikon, and so on, until they started getting European-style names (Thomas Stores). The only Lenape name I know of to get translated was Touching Leaves Woman – and she was responsible for that translation herself (she died several years ago). Weequehela, according to a much later source, was called “McQueeley” by the local Scottish Quakers, but that’s alomost certainly a nickname. It sounds like an attempt to make “Weequehela” sound as if it was Scottish.
Come to think of it, I don’t know of any Massachusetts names that gor translated either. Massasoit, Shawmut, and so on. The closest thing was the use of alternate names, as in “King Phillip”.
As for translating European nasmes, the first translation of Jeules Verne I read was “A Journey to the Center of the Earth”, in which the translator insisted on “translating” Prof. Lindenbrock’s name as “Hardwigg”. I hated it.
The practice seems to have been restricted in time, as well as in space. bibliophage’s Seneca examples seem to date mostly to the last half of the 1700s. Any earlier examples?
I correct myself again on Mangas Coloradas. His name was not a translation, but a nickname based on his shirt color.
At least in California, the Spaniards baptised the natives and gave them all new names, such that their descendants all tend to have Spanish last names. There are of course records of what the original names were, such as Mitchisan who became Juan de Mata. It seems though that occasionally if they were not born at the mission, they kept their Indian names, such as a woman named Quetchesh. who was a daughter of Mitchisan and a woman named Tippin. Some, kept their Indian name, but used it as a sur name or second name: Lopostchoschu who became Longino Jose Lopostchoschu. These are all names from the Ohlone indians.
Not necessarily an exception, but what was Geronimo’s real name? (“Geronimo” merely being the Spanish equivalent (IIRC) of Jerome). And why was he called that?