Skunk
The People of the Dawn Land, the Wabanakiyik, numbered at least 40,000, living in scattered bands throughout what is now Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine, before the first epidemics hit five hundred years ago. The diseases spread from European settlements in the far south and north of New England, so that the Wabanakiyik were hit long before they encountered Europeans face to face. By the time the English landed in Plymouth, the Wabanakiyik (usually called the Abenaki today) had lost between 50-75% of their population. 150 years of further epidemics, war, and forced migrations, reduced them to around 1,000. Today they have rebounded to 12,000, split between the United States and Canada, but many of them still have not achieved tribal recognition from the US government.
The Wabanakiyik word for “one who squirts” was something like segongw or segonku or seganku, and this was applied to the notorious ungainly black and white animal that visited their gardens at night in search of insects and grubs. The European settlers borrowed the word, spelling it squunk at first.
The word skunk is a remarkable example of sound-meaning correspondence that reaches across language families. Skunk is not related to any other English word, but it looks like a combination of squirt (from about 1470, imitative) and stunk, an irregular nonstandard past participle of stink, which is from Old English stincan. The onset “sk” suggests directed motion from a container; the “unk”, meanwhile, is similar to lung, sung, and tongue, all of which have to do with breathing and the throat. (According to Margaret Magnus’s phonosemantic analysis, the short “u” is “thoughtful and relaxed”, but I suspect it has other meanings.)
