释义 |
Mobilian, n.|məʊˈbɪlɪən| Also Mobile |məʊˈbiːl|. [? f. the town of Mobile in Alabama + -ian.] A lingua franca or trade language used formerly in south-eastern North America (see quot. 1907). Also as adj.
1840G. Bancroft Hist U.S. III. xxii. 249 The whole country south-east, south, and west of the Cherokees..was in the possession of one great family of nations, of which the language was named by the French the Mobilian, and is described by Gallatin as the Muskhogee-Chocta. 1907F. W. Hodge Handbk. Amer. Indians I. 916/1 The so-called Mobilian trade language was a corrupted Choctaw jargon used for the purposes of inter-tribal communication among all the tribes from Florida to Louisiana, extending northward on the Mississippi to about the junction of the Ohio. It was also known as the Chickasaw trade language. 1928W. A. Read Indian Place-Names Louisiana 6 The identity of Manchac with the Mobilian imashaka, ‘rear entrance’, is rendered more plausible by my discovery of the form Mashake. 1937Amer. Speech XII. 212 Besides the Shawnee words one Algonquian term has slipped in through the medium of the Mobilian trade language. 1947P. S. Martin et al. Indians before Columbus 68 In the Southeast a Choctaw jargon called ‘Mobilian’ was spoken from Florida to Louisiana and up the Mississippi River as far north as the Ohio. 1964Amer. Speech XXXIX. 16 He [sc. Charles P. G. Scott] attempted to push O.K. back to the Mobile trade language, current along the Gulf of Mexico in the eighteenth century. |