Punxsutawney and Maxatawny
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It's unlikely that I ever would have written a post on the strange-sounding name "Punxsutawney" because it is so well-known worldwide for groundhog Phil who lives there and can predict whether winter weather will persist after he wakes up from his hibernation, although it is nestled in the wooded hills about 85 miles northeast of Pittsburgh.
On the other hand, few have ever heard of Maxatawny, despite the fact that it is only 65 miles northwest of Philadelphia and situated on mostly flat land.
I never would have been aware of Maxatawny either, but for the miracle of the internet, because I happened upon it while surfing the www, which I have spent a goodly part of my life doing since its invention. When I saw mention of Maxatawny pop up on my computer screen, I was instantaneously nearly catapulted out of my seat because of its obvious likeness to Punxsutawney.
Years ago, I had tried to figure out the etymology of Punxsutawney and did — more or less — come to the realization that the nucleus of the name was -tawney and that it probably meant "town" (more about the derivation of "Punxsutawney" below). in any event, morphologically Punxsutawney and Maxatawny bear such a striking resemblance to each other that they must be related, even though Punxsutawney is about 250 miles west of Maxatawny.
Let's look at the two toponyms more closely:
Maxatawny is a name derived from a Native American language purported to mean "bear's path creek".
Hmmm…. I'm dubious about the accuracy of the translation.
We have a lot more information about the name of Phil's home ground:
Shawnee wigwam villages once occupied this site on the Mahoning Creek. The first settlement that included non-indigenous people was established in 1772, when Reverend John Ettwein, a Moravian Church missionary, arrived with a band of 241 christianized Lenape. Swarms of gnats plagued early settlers and their livestock for years, and are blamed for Ettwein's failure to establish a permanent settlement there. The clouds of biting gnats eventually drove the indigenous people away.
The indigenous people called the insects ponkies (living dust and ashes), and called their village Ponkis Utenink (land of the ponkies), from which the present name Punxsutawney evolved. One legend about the origin of the term ponkies concerned an old indigenous sorcerer-hermit who was said to have long terrorized indigenous people in the region. Eventually he was killed, his body burned, and his ashes were cast to the wind. According to the story, the ashes were transformed into minute living things that infested the swamp land. Another story about the source of the term asserted that the indigenous people compared the insect bites to burns caused by sparks or hot ashes.
The area was originally settled by the Lenape Indian tribe, and a more definitive source says the name Punxsutawney derives from a Native name in the Lenape language, Unami: Punkwsutènay, which translates to "town of the sandflies" or "town of the mosquitoes" (punkwës– 'mosquito' + –utènay 'town').
…
Settlers drawn by lumbering and coal mining eventually drained the swamps and exterminated the insects.
Phil, whatever the name of your hometown may mean — please, please, please don't see your shadow Sunday morning. Blink your eyes a few times, then hurry-scurry back down in your burrow and catch six more weeks of woozy winks. I am so, so tired of the bitter cold of the last two months.
Selected reading
- "The pragmatics of nyms, hyper- and hypo-" (8/28/21) — pertinent to this post in that MYL wrote it the day after having spent a couple of hours "swatting at mosquitoes and gnats" in a Pennsylvania state park
- "Year of the muroid" (2/9/20) — applies also to our snake posts and to groundhogs (and other kinds of "hogs"); don't miss the comments
BTW, how much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?
J.W. Brewer said,
January 31, 2025 @ 12:32 pm
Maxatawny Township is, I learn from consulting the internet, the site of the somewhat better-known borough of Kutztown, whose name reminds us of the quite substantial number of German-speakers who were arriving in the area as the Lenape-speakers were being driven farther west and taking their toponym-relevant morphemes with them.
Maxatawny is separately the name of "Census-Designated Place" – i.e. not a municipality with any independent existence as a matter of Pennsylvania law – located about five miles east of Kutztown. That Maxatawny per google maps a 24-minute drive (14.5 miles) north of Manatawny, Pa., also in Berks County, whose name as written varies by but a single letter.
J.W. Brewer said,
January 31, 2025 @ 12:38 pm
I should have added that in a November 2024 social media post the Berks History Center gives "Ma chksihanne" as a supposedly more authentic Lenape spelling, glossed (plausibly or otherwise) as "Bear Path Creek." I suspect the space after "Ma" was a glitch rather than a feature of Lenape orthography, but I'm not 100% sure so I'm transcribing it as I found it.
Paul Clapham said,
January 31, 2025 @ 1:57 pm
I know this is somewhat off topic, but why is it that the USA has only one weather-forecasting marmot whereas Canada has at least seven? Okay, not all of them are Marmota monax but should that matter?
Okay, language-related. One of them is "Fred la Marmotte" who works in Quebec. He's an example of male bias in the sciurid weather forecasting business; when we were hiking in Switzerland a few years ago the mascot for one region was "Charlotte la Marmotte", which is a much better name. Although I don't believe she was in the weather forecasting business.
Philip Taylor said,
January 31, 2025 @ 1:59 pm
A woodchuck would chuck as much wood as a woodchuck could chuck, if a woodchuck could chuck wood. Could you, in return, say more about groundhog Phil, of whom I have never previously heard ?
J.W. Brewer said,
January 31, 2025 @ 2:08 pm
@Paul Clapham: Oh, we have a lot of local-celebrity forecasting groundhogs in the U.S., although Punx Phil is maybe the only one with a truly national reputation. That Punxatawney is the setting of the popular 1993 movie _Groundhog Day_ may have something to do with this, but OTOH presumably Phil's preexisting prominence in the field may have had something to do with the decision to set the firm there.
Here in the metropolitan New York City area many will remember the tragic Groundhog Day of 2014, when local-celebrity-groundhog Staten Island Chuck (simply "Charlotte" when offstage) was badly mishandled and dropped by then-Mayor de Blasio and died several days later, supposedly (plausible rumors versus implausible bureaucratic denials) of internal injuries sustained from the fall. Murdered, whispered the mayor's more vehement political opponents.