NAAIN-019 - ethnographic attestation
Muscogee Creek fohfokv bull-roarer game
United States - Eufaula - eastern Oklahoma - North America - Southeast
Play / practical
fohfokv Muscogee / English translation
Source term: fohfokv; bull-roarer
fohfokv — Muscogee (Creek) word glossed as "bull-roarer" in James H. Hill's "Various Games" text, where it is named as a game for one person to play alone.
The Muscogee (Creek) word fohfokv appears in a short text on various games as the name for a bull-roarer, glossed in English as a game for one person to play alone. The text is one of some 140 stories and language samples that James H. Hill of Eufaula, Oklahoma, wrote out for the linguist Mary R. Haas during her fieldwork in eastern Oklahoma between 1936 and 1940. Hill records no dimensions, no maker, and no ceremony; the toy sits among ordinary amusements. The corpus was edited and published only in 2014, by Jack B. Martin, Margaret McKane Mauldin, and Juanita McGirt.
Fohfokv sahkopvnkvo océs.
There was also a game [called] fohfokv ['bull-roarer']. It's for someone to play alone…
Mary R. Haas & James H. Hill, Creek (Muskogee) Texts, ed. Jack B. Martin, Margaret McKane Mauldin & Juanita McGirt (2015), James Hill's text on games
- Object
- Whirled noisemaker attested lexically; Hill's text classes it as a game played by one person and records no physical description.
- Function
- Muscogee bull-roarer game; the checked source gives game context and solitary play, with no ritual function stated.
- Map confidence
- medium_high - Eufaula, Oklahoma community anchor for James H. Hill's source provenance; the text corpus is tied to Haas's eastern Oklahoma fieldwork and Hill of Eufaula, not to an exact performance or collection site.
- Source location
Page references
Creek (Muskogee) Texts pp. 247, 254; Muskogee Documentation Project
- Toy / secular survival