iambrutus;703963; said:
just guessing here
from Wiki
Though, for the erudite among us...
What is the origin of the English word squaw?
'Squaw' is one of a number of words in English that were borrowed from Eastern Algonquian languages, sometimes via French, during the early contact period. The source in this case is conventionally Massachusett
squas (
Webster's New World Dictionary, 2nd Edition). The term meant 'young woman' in Massachusett and is attested as early as 1624. In fact, related words derived from Proto-Algonquian *
et^kwe:wa (t^ represents a theta - a th sound) 'woman' occur throughout the Algonquian language family. Mostly they're fairly similar to the proto-form and each other (cf. Cree
iskwe:w), though in a few languages the descendant form is so modified by accumulated sound changes that only someone familiar with the changes involved would recognize it, e.g., Arapahoe
h?thei.
Bright's useful summary of this cites
Cutler 1994 and Goddard 1996, 1997 for the etymology of the term.
Recently 'squaw' has been spuriously associated with a Mohawk term
ots?skwa? 'female genitalia'. The ? here represents a glottal stop - the sound represented by dash in (h)uh-uh 'no'. This sounds to English ears somewhat like [ojiskwa] (oh-gee-squah in the Lewis & Clark Phonetic Alphabet). Bright says this incorrect explanation was first offered by Sanders & Peck in 1974 and then popularized in a television interview by Suzan Harjo. The terrible salaciousness of it all has outraged the socially sensitive and captured popular imagination so effectively that the long known actual explanation in terms of Massachussett tends to get overlooked.
http://spot.colorado.edu/~koontz/faq/etymology.htm
There are two kinds of people in this world.
1. Those who have this curious, special need to be offended.
2. Those with a life.
And life, goddamnit, is choices.
For those who wish to contemplate the "choices" of Susan Harjo (referred to above):
http://www.tomjonas.com/squawpeak/changingperception.htm