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 film 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.
Anthony said,
January 31, 2025 @ 3:07 pm
Mayor Bloomberg was bitten in 2009.
Ross Presser said,
January 31, 2025 @ 3:44 pm
> BTW, how much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?
**ZOT**
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Oracle
David Marjanović said,
January 31, 2025 @ 6:02 pm
First things first: woodchucks can in fact chuck wood – 361.9237001 cm³/day, assuming Paskevich & Shea (1995) really conducted their improbable study.
Paskevich PA, Shea TB. 1995. The ability of woodchucks to chuck cellulose fibers. Annals of Improbable Research 1(4): 4–9.
So that's where all the cold went! In western and central Europe the last two months were ridiculously warm. In some places this is the first winter without any snow in… how about four hundred thousand years?
The only species of marmot in Europe lives exclusively at high altitudes where the weather is always quite different from what it is at the bottom of the valleys.
Jeremy K said,
February 1, 2025 @ 8:19 am
In WV, we have French Creek Freddie predicting the weather on Ground Hog's Day
Joshua K. said,
February 1, 2025 @ 10:49 am
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.
There seems to be something garbled in that sentence. The fact that the town name is well-known worldwide should not have deterred you from writing a post about it, nor should being located in the hills 85 miles northeast of Pittsburgh prevent Phil from predicting the weather. (I mean, the fact that the groundhog seeing his shadow is just a superstition should prevent Phil from predicting the weather, but not the fact that he is in the wooded hills 85 miles from Pittsburgh.)
Joshua K. said,
February 1, 2025 @ 10:50 am
In the previous comment, the first sentence was meant to be tagged as a blockquote.
Victor Mair said,
February 1, 2025 @ 11:30 am
@Joshua K.
Your captious nitpicking causes the implosion of your own decent analysis of the logic behind my initial paragraph.
Michael Carasik said,
February 2, 2025 @ 5:04 am
As some will know, the American Philosophical Society right in Philadelphia is the national center for preservation and study of American Indian languages. I would always turn to them with questions of this sort.
CuConnacht said,
February 2, 2025 @ 4:36 pm
I have been told that in Germany it was badgers who predicted the weather by seeing their shadow or not, on the same date as here, Candlemas (February 2), the feast of the purification of the Virgin Mary.
I suppose that the idea behind the story is that at this time of year in the Northern Hemisphere, bright clear days tend to be colder than overcast days, because of radiational cooling.
Victor Mair said,
February 2, 2025 @ 5:29 pm
Punxsutawney Phil saw his shadow this morning and scurried back into his burrow for six more weeks of hibernation.
No wonder it was so cold today.
Joshua K. said,
February 4, 2025 @ 11:10 pm
To give a non-nitpicking comment, I notice that the keystone marker for Punxsutawney contains the uninformative information "Name of Indian origin." I suppose that the town leadership would have discouraged the construction of a sign that said "Name meaning 'Town of the Mosquitoes.'" That would be bad for tourism.
Ahcuah said,
February 5, 2025 @ 10:46 pm
According to talk-lenape.org, mosquitoes is "punkwsàk", bear is "màxkw", and "town" (with the locative suffix "-ink") is "utènink". Looks pretty clear to me.
Daniel Barkalow said,
February 10, 2025 @ 1:45 pm
It seems plausible that Maxatawny is an eggcorn: settlers assumed that it was a town and should end in "tawny" when it was actually a waterway and should end in "heny".