The Composition of Indian Geographical Names Part 6

[Footnote 89: Whitney's Language and the Study of Language, p.

69.--"Ein naturliches Volksgefuhl, oft auch der Volkswitz, den nicht mehr verstandenen Namen neu umpragte und mit anderen lebenden Wortern in Verbindung setzte." Dr. J. Bender, _Die deutschen Ortsnamen_ (2te Ausg.) p. 2.]

[Footnote 90: Haldeman's a.n.a.lytic Orthography, --279, and "Etymology as a means of Education," in Pennsylvania School Journal for October, 1868.]

[Footnote 91: "Swatawro," on Sayer and Bennett's Map, 1775.]

[Footnote 92: "Whiskey Jack," the name by which the Canada Jay (Perisoreus Canadensis) is best known to the lumbermen and hunters of Maine and Canada, is the Montagnais _Ouishcatcha[n]_ (Cree, _Ouiskeshauneesh_), which has pa.s.sed perhaps through the transitional forms of 'Ouiske Jean' and 'Whiskey Johnny.' The s.h.a.gbark Hickory nuts, in the dialect of the Abnakis called _s'k[oo]skada'mennar_, literally, 'nuts to be cracked with the teeth,' are the 'Kuskatominies' and 'Kisky Thomas' nuts of descendants of the Dutch colonists of New Jersey and New York. A contraction of the _plural_ form of a Ma.s.sachusetts noun-generic,--_asquash_, denoting 'things which are eaten green, or without cooking,' was adopted as the name of a garden vegetable,--with conscious reference, perhaps, to the old English word _squash_, meaning 'something soft or immature.' Sometimes etymology overreaches itself, by regarding an aboriginal name as the corrupt form of a foreign one. Thus the _maskalonge_ or 'great long-nose' of the St. Lawrence (see p. 43) has been reputed of French extraction,--_masque elonge_: and _sagackomi_, the northern name of a plant used as a subst.i.tute for or to mix with tobacco,--especially, of the Bearberry, _Arctostaphylos uva-ursi_,--is resolved into _sac-a-commis_, "on account of the Hudson's Bay officers carrying it in bags for smoking," as Sir John Richardson believed (Arctic Searching Expedition, ii. 303). It was left for the ingenuity of a Westminster Reviewer to discover that _barbecue_ (denoting, in the language of the Indians of Guiana, a wooden frame or grille on which all kinds of flesh and fish were dry-roasted, or cured in smoke,) might be a corruption of the French _barbe a queue_, i.e. 'from snout to tail;' a suggestion which appears to have found favor with lexicographers.]

In Connecticut and Rhode Island special causes operated to corrupt and transform almost beyond possibility of recognition, many of the Indian place names. Five different dialects at least were spoken between Narragansett Bay and the Housatonic River, at the time of the first coming of the English. In early deeds and conveyances in the colonial and in local records, we find the same river, lake, tract of land or bound-mark named sometimes in the Muhhekan, sometimes in the Narragansett, or Niantic, or Nipmuck, or Connecticut valley, or Quinnipiac (Quiripee) dialect. The adopted name is often _extra-limitary_ to the tribe by which it was given. Often, it is a mixture of, or a sort of compromise between, two dialects; half Muhhekan, half Narragansett or Nipmuck. In the form in which it comes to us, we can only guess from what language or languages it has been corrupted.

The a.n.a.lysis of those names even whose composition appears to be most obvious must be accepted as _provisional_ merely. The recovery of a lost syllable or of a lost guttural or nasal, the correction of a false accent even, may give to the synthesis another and hitherto unsuspected meaning. It would be surprising if some of the translations which have been hazarded in this paper do not prove to be wide of their mark. Even English etymology is not reckoned among the exact sciences yet,--and in Algonkin, there is the additional disadvantage of having no Sanskrit verbs "to go," to fall back on as a last resort.

Recent manifestations of an increasing interest in Indian onomatology, or at least of awakened curiosity to discover the meanings of Indian names, may perhaps justify the writer in offering, at the close of this paper, a few suggestions, as to the method of a.n.a.lysis which appears most likely to give correct results, and as to the tests by which to judge of the _probability_ that a supposed translation of any name is the true one.

1. The earliest recorded form of the name should be sought for, and every variation from it should be noted. These should be taken so far as possible from original ma.n.u.scripts, not from printed copies.

2. Where the difference of forms is considerable, knowledge of the character and opportunities of the writer may sometimes determine the preference of one form to others, as probably the most accurate. A Ma.s.sachusetts or Connecticut name written by John Eliot or Experience Mayhew--or by the famous interpreter, Thomas Stanton--may safely be a.s.sumed to represent the original combination of sounds more exactly than the form given it by some town-recorder, ignorant of the Indian language and who perhaps did not always write or spell his own correctly.

3. The name should be considered with some reference to the topographical features of the region to which it belongs. These may sometimes determine the true meaning when the a.n.a.lysis is doubtful, or may suggest the meaning which would otherwise have been unsuspected under the modern form.

4. Remembering that every letter or sound had its value,--if, in the a.n.a.lysis of a name, it becomes necessary to get rid of a troublesome consonant or vowel by a.s.suming it to have been introduced 'for the sake of euphony,'--it is probable that the interpretation so arrived at is _not_ the right one.

5. The components of every place-name--or to speak more generally, the elements of every Indian synthesis are _significant roots_, not mere _fractions of words_ arbitrarily selected for new combinations. There has been no more prolific source of error in dealings with the etymology and the grammatical structure of the American languages than that one-sided view of the truth which was given by Duponceau[93] in the statement that "one or more syllables of each simple word are generally chosen and combined together, in one compound locution, often leaving out the harsh consonants for the sake of euphony,"--and repeated by Heckewelder,[94] when he wrote, that "in the Delaware and other American languages, parts or parcels of different words, sometimes a single sound or letter, are compounded together in an artificial manner so as to avoid the meeting of harsh or disagreeable sounds," &c. The "single sound or letter" the "one or more syllables,"

were chosen not as "part or parcel" of a word but because of their _inherent significance_. The Delaware "_Pilape_, a youth," is _not_--as Heckewelder and Duponceau represented it to be[95]--"formed from _pilsit_, chaste, innocent, and _lenape_, a man," but from PIL- (Ma.s.s. _pen-_, Abn. _pir-_,) strange, novel, _unused_ (and hence) pure,--and -A[N]PE (Ma.s.s. _-omp_, Abn. _a[n]be_) a male, _vir_. It is true that the same roots are found in the two words PIL-_sit_ (a participle of the verb-adjective _pil-esu_, 'he is pure,') and _len_-A[N]PE, 'common man:' but the statement that "one or more syllables" are _taken from_ these words to form _Pilape_ is inaccurate and misleading. It might with as much truth be said that the English word _boyhood_ is formed from selected syllables of boy-ish and man-hood; or that purity 'compounds together in an artificial manner'

fractions of _pur_ify and qual_ity_.

[Footnote 93: Correspondence of Duponceau and Heckewelder, in Trans.

Historical and Literary Committee of Am. Philos. Society, p. 403.]

[Footnote 94: Ibid., p. 406.]

[Footnote 95: Preface to Duponceau's translation of Zeisberger's Grammar, p. 21. On Duponceau's authority, Dr. Pickering accepted this a.n.a.lysis and gave it currency by repeating it, in his admirable paper on "Indian Languages," in the Encyclopaedia Americana, vol. vi.]

We meet with similar a.n.a.lyses in almost every published list of Indian names. Some examples have been given in the preceding pages of this paper,--as in the interpretation of 'Winnipisiogee' (p. 32) by 'the beautiful water of the high place,' _s_ or _[=e]s_ being regarded as the fractional representative of '_kees_, high.' _Pemigewa.s.set_ has been translated by 'crooked place of pines' and 'crooked mountain pine place,'--as if _k[oo]-a_, 'a pine,' or its plural _k[oo]-ash_, could dispense in composition with its significant base, _k[oo]_, and appear by a grammatical formative only.

6. No interpretation of a place-name is correct which makes _bad grammar_ of the original. The apparatus of Indian synthesis was c.u.mbersome and perhaps inelegant, but it was nicely adjusted to its work. The grammatical relations of words were never lost sight of. The several components of a name had their established order, not dependent upon the will or skill of the composer. When we read modern advertis.e.m.e.nts of "cheap gentlemen's traveling bags" or "steel-faced carpenters' claw hammers," we may construe such phrases with a lat.i.tude which was not permitted to the Algonkins. If 'Connecticut'

means--as some have supposed it to mean--'long deer place,' it denotes a place where _long deer_ abounded; if 'Piscataqua' was named 'great deer river,' it was because the deer found _in_ that river were of remarkable size. 'Coaquanock' or, as Heckewelder wrote it, 'Cuwequenaku,' the site of Philadelphia, may mean 'pine long-place'

but cannot mean 'long pine-place' or 'grove of long pine trees.' If 'Pemigewa.s.set' is compounded of words signifying 'crooked,' 'pines,'

and 'place,' it denotes 'a place of crooked pines,'--not 'crooked place of pines.'

Again--every Indian name is _complete within itself_. A mere adjectival or qualificative cannot serve independently, leaving the real ground-word to be supplied by the hearer. River names must contain some element which denotes 'river;' names of lakes or ponds something which stands for 'lake' or 'pond.' The Indians had not our fas.h.i.+on of speech which permits Hudson's River to be called 'the Hudson,' drops the word 'lake' from 'Champlain' or 'Erie,' and makes "the Alleghanies" a geographical name. This difference must not be lost sight of, in a.n.a.lysis or translation. _Agawam_ or _Auguan_ (a name given to several localities in New England where there are low flat meadows or marshes,) cannot be the equivalent of the Abnaki _ag[oo]a[n]n_, which means 'a smoke-dried fish,'[96]--though _ag[oo]a[n]na-ki_ or something like it (if such a name should be found), might mean 'smoked-fish place.' _Chickahominy_ does not stand for 'great corn,' nor _Pawcatuck_ for 'much or many deer;'[97] because neither 'corn' nor 'deer' designates _place_ or implies fixed location, and therefore neither can be made the ground-word of a place-name. _Androscoggin_ or _Amoscoggin_ is not from the Abnaki '_amaskohegan_, fish-spearing,'[98] for a similar reason (and moreover, because the termination _-h[=e]gan_ denotes always an _instrument_, never an _action_ or a _place_; it may belong to 'a fish-spear,' but not to 'fish spearing' nor to the locality 'where fish are speared.')

[Footnote 96: It was so interpreted in the Historical Magazine for May, 1865 (p. 90).]

[Footnote 97: Ibid. To this interpretation of _Pawcatuck_ there is the more obvious objection that a prefix signifying 'much or many' should be followed not by _ahtuk_ or _attuk_, 'a deer,' but by the plural _ahtukquog_.]

[Footnote 98: Etymological Vocabulary of Geographical Names, appended to the last edition of Webster's Dictionary (1864). It may be proper to remark in this connection, that the writer's responsibility for the correctness of translations given in that vocabulary does not extend beyond his own contributions to it.]

7. The locative post-position, _-et_, _-it_ or _-ut_,[99] means _in_, _at_ or _on_,--not 'land' or 'place.' It locates, not the object to the name of which it is affixed, but _something else_ as related to that object,--which must be of such a nature that location can be predicated of it. _Animate nouns_, that is, names of animate objects cannot receive this affix. 'At the rock' (_ompsk-ut_), 'at the mountain' (_wadchu-ut_), or 'in the country' (_ohk-it_, _auk-it_), is intelligible, in Indian or English; 'at the deer,' 'at the bear,' or 'at the sturgeons,' would be nonsense in any language. When animate nouns occur in place-names, they receive the formative of verbals, or serve as adjectival prefixes to some localizing ground-word or noun-generic.

[Footnote 99: Abnaki and Cree, _-k_ or _-g_,--Delaware and Chippewa, _-ng_; or _-[n]g_,--with a connecting vowel.]

8. Finally,--in the a.n.a.lysis of geographical names, differences of _language_ and _dialect_ must not be disregarded. In determining the primary meaning of roots, great a.s.sistance may be had by the comparison of derivatives in nearly related languages of the same stock. But in American languages, the diversity of dialects is even more remarkable than the ident.i.ty and constancy of roots. Every tribe, almost every village had its peculiarities of speech. Names etymologically identical might have widely different meanings in two languages, or even in two nations speaking substantially the same language. The eastern Algonkin generic name for 'fish' (_nama-us_, Del. _namai-s_) is restricted by northern and western tribes to a single species, the sturgeon (Chip. _namai'_,) as _the_ fish, par excellence. _Attuk_, in Ma.s.sachusetts was the common fallow-deer,--in Canada and the north-west the caribou or reindeer. The Abnaki Indian called his _dog_ (_atie_) by a name which the Chippewa gives his _horse_ (_oti-un_; _n'di_, my horse).[100] The most common noun-generic of river names in New England (_-tuk_, 'tidal river') occurs rarely in those of Pennsylvania and Virginia, where it is replaced by _-hanne_ ('rapid stream'), and is unknown to western Algonkin tribes whose streams are undisturbed by tides. The a.n.a.lysis of a geographical name must be sought in the language spoken by the name-givers. The correct translation of a Connecticut or Narragansett name is not likely to be attained by searching for its several components in a Chippewa vocabulary; or of the name of a locality near Hudson's River, by deriving its prefix from an Abnaki adverb and its ground-word from a Chippewa participle,--as was actually done in a recently published list of Indian names.

[Footnote 100: Both words have the same meaning,--that of 'a domestic animal,' or literally, 'animate property;' 'he who _belongs_ to me.']