Proceedings of the New York Historical Association [1906]New York State Historical Association. Meeting
History
Proceedings of the New York Historical Association [1906]
New York State Historical Association. Meeting
New York (State) -- History -- Periodicals; New York State Historical Association -- Periodicals
No vocabularies of the dialects spoken in the lower valley of the Hudson
having been preserved, the vocabularies of the Upper-Unami and the
Minsi-Lenape, or Delaware tongues on the south and west, and the Natick,
or Massachusetts, on the north and east, have been consulted for
explanations by comparative inductive methods, and also orthographies
in other places, the interpretations of which have been established by
competent linguists. In all cases where the meaning of terms has been
particularly questioned, the best expert authority has been consulted.
While positive accuracy is not asserted in any case, it is believed that
in most cases the interpretations which have been given may be accepted
as substantially correct. There is no poetry in them--no "glittering
waterfalls," no "beautiful rivers," no "smile of the Great Spirit," no
"Holy place of sacred feasts and dances," but plain terms that have
their equivalents in our own language for a small hill, a high hill, a
mountain, a brook, a creek, a kill, a river, a pond, a lake, a swamp,
a large stone, a place of small stones, a split rock, a meadow, or
whatever the objective feature may have been as recognized by the
Indian. Many of them were particular names in the form of verbals
indicating a place where the action of the verb was performed;
occasionally the name of a sachem is given as that of his place of
residence or the stream on which he resided, but all are from generic
roots.
To the Algonquian dialects spoken in the valley of Hudson's River at the
time of the discovery, was added later the Mohawk--Iroquorian, to some
extent, more particularly on the north, where it appears about 1621-6,
as indicated in the blanket deed given by the Five Nations to King
George in 1726. Territorially, in the primary era of European invasion,
the Eastern Algonquian prevailed, in varying idioms, on both sides of
the river, from a northern point to the Katskills, and from thence south
to the Highlands a type of the Unami-Minsi-Lenape or Delaware. That
spoken around New York on both sides of the river, was classed by the
early Dutch writers as Manhattan, as distinguished from dialects in the
Highlands and from the Savano or dialects of the East New England coast.
North of the Highlands on both sides of the river, they classed the
dialect as Wapping, and from the Katskills north as Mahican or Mohegan,
preserved in part in what is known as the Stockbridge. Presumably the
dialects were more or less mixed and formed as a whole what may be
termed "The Hudson's River Dialect," radically Lenape or Delaware, as
noted by Governor Tryon in 1774. In local names we seem to meet the
Upper-Unami and the Minsi of New Jersey, and the Mohegan and the Natick
of the north and east, the Quiripi of the Sound, and the dialect of the
Connecticut Valley. In the belt of country south of the Katskills they
were soft and vocalic, the lingual mute _t_ frequently appearing and
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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