Onondaga
(ɒnənˈdɑːgə)
[Onondaga onōṅtáˀke on the hill (the name of the main Onondaga settlement).]
One of the five (later six) tribes of the Iroquois Confederacy of North American Indians commonly called the Five Nations (Six Nations), traditionally living near Syracuse, New York; a member of this tribe; their language. Also attrib. or as adj.
| 1684 in Mass. Hist. Soc. Coll. (1871) 4th Ser. IX. 187, I haue perswaded all the considerable Indians, the Maquas, Sineques, Onondages..to give up their lands. 1765 in Documents Colonial Hist. New-York (1856) VII. 719 The Onondaga Speaker Tyawarunt spoke as follows. 1823 [see Cayuga]. 1826 J. F. Cooper Last of Mohicans I. xii. 181 The Mohawks, with their Tuscarora and Onondaga brethren. 1874 B. F. Taylor World on Wheels i. 31 The painted Senecas and the smoky Onondagas went gliding about like vanishing shadows. 1933 [see Cayuga]. 1959 [see Five Nations s.v. five a. and n. C. 2]. 1971 D. Heffron Nice Fire & Some Moonpennies vii. 59 My mother is an Onondaga and my father was a Mohawk. 1974 H. Woodbury in Papers in Linguistics, Conf. Iroquoian Res. 1972 2 One way of characterizing Onondaga noun incorporation is to describe its appearance in the surface structure of this language. Ibid. 5 In Onondaga, complex sentences are subject to special rules with respect to noun incorporation. Ibid. 15 Onondaga does not have relative clauses in the same sense that English does. |