How to Spell in Colonial America (Part 1 of 3)

=== Odd Spellings ===

 

“these People are Singelir from the Rest of thare Nighbors. thay Speake a Hard un Corth Langwige Scarst to be Larnt By Eney People. thay will not aSosheat with or Convars with the other tribes Nor Intermarey among them”

— Peter Pond, fur trader, ca 1800

 

A long time ago I watched a documentary about the Powhatan and the settlement of Jamestown.  The producers of the documentary had felt the need to use more authentic Native American names for the Powhatan leaders, so instead of “Chief Powhatan” the video scrupulously called him by his Powhatan name: Wahunsenacawh.  This is one of two common spellings of his name, the other being Wahunsonacock—it makes no difference which you prefer.  The Jamestown settlers themselves were not very precise in how they wrote down these Indian names.  But the producers of this documentary wanted to be authentic, and so they instructed the narrator to say it with, what they felt to be, the correct and respectful pronunciation of “wah-hoon-seh-NAH-kuh-wuh” /wa.ˈhun.sɛ.ˈna.kə.wə/.

 

This is in all likelihood not the correct way to say this name.  But more important than the fact that they said it wrong, is the why of it.  There are two ways to look at old names like these.  Way #1 is to treat them like foreign names—like Toshiro Mifune or Omar Sharif—and say them with an “international” pronunciation, enunciating the vowels according to their Spanish or Italian values: <u> as “oo”, <e> as “ay” et cetera.  Way #2 is to read them as though they’re English names and give the vowels their English values, the kind we were taught in school: short ŭ as in “cut”, long ū as in “cute”, long ā as it “wait”, etc.  The latter is used in certain grandfathered-in Latin phrases such “semper fi” and “habeas corpus”, which believe it or not is how Latin used to be pronounced by English classicists.  The reason for the discrepancy is the English Great Vowel Shift—during the Middle Ages, the English language still wrote and pronounced its vowels as Spanish and Italian do today.

 

The problem is that the Jamestown settlers were not Geoffrey Chaucer, they were not Italians, and they were not modern linguists.  Let me illustrate with another example.  The Massawomeck are a “lost tribe” of North America who once inhabited the headwaters of the Ohio River in western Pennsylvania.  They feature briefly in the records of the Jamestown colony and the Dutch colony of New Netherlands, but were soon after destroyed, absorbed, or run off by the Susquehannock.  They are a pretty obscure group and so their name is no longer in common use, and you almost never hear it spoken out loud.  I have heard it “in the wild” in fact only once, in the Disney film Pocahontas of all things.  In the opening scene, when the aforementioned Wahunsonacock (not so called in the film) arrives at the village of Werowocomoco (ditto), he announces to the resident Powhatan that his war party has defeated the Massawomecks.  The voice actor (Russell Means) pronounces it more or less how you’d expect: “mass-uh-WOE-meck ~ /mæsəˈwomɛk/.

 

Why is this wrong?  Because linguistically we can identify the name Massawomeck as meaning “people of the big valley” in Virginia Algonquian—phonetically it was something like məhsēwamak.  To understand why the Jamestonians spelled this as “Massawomeck” you need only imagine that word as if written with little Webster’s-style pronunciation guide vowel diacritics: \mässāwŏməck\ or “mah-say-wah-muck” as the Powhatan name was adapted to 17th century English.  In other words the vowel in the second syllable was “long ay”, the third syllable “short ŏ”, and so on.  Over time, though, this pronunciation was lost as the name fell out of use, and has been replaced with a new pronunciation matching what it looks like.  This is called a spelling pronunciation.

 

This is not to say that the movie got it wrong.  None of the spelling pronunciations (and other mutations) in this post are wrong exactly, since that is just how they are said now.  It is what it is; languages change; old forms are lost; new forms replace them—life goes on.  Russell Means was right: that is how “Massawomeck” should probably be pronounced in modern English, which after all is not Jacobian English.  I assume it’s how most historians of colonial Virginia say it.  Insisting on saying it in the old way is a bit like insisting that the characters in that film all pronounce the “k” in the word “knife”.  Sure, that’s how it was pronounced at the time... but who carse?

 

The difference, I think, is that the producers of the Jamestown documentary clearly were trying to give it an original, authentic pronunciation, and in this endeavor they failed.  They didn’t quite know what they were doing.  “Wahunsenacawh” looks like it should be /wahunsɛnakəwa/ only if we treat it as a foreign name written in a technical orthography, but doing it that way is backwards.  It’s the mistake of thinking that written language comes before the spoken.  Powhatan was not generally a written language (and on occasions when it was written down, it wasn’t in a modern phonetic orthography).  First came the Powhatan spoken form, which was then imitated by the settlers as an English spoken form, which was then given a written spelling according to contemporary orthographic standards.  And it is those standards—augmented by comparative Algonquian linguistics—which you must observe if you really wish to be authentic [note A].

 

But I get it, I know why the doc said it the way it did.  Something about this colonial way of spelling just feels... wrong.  “Massawomeck” doesn’t look like it should have a “long ay” in the second syllable or a “short ŏ” in the third.  It’s hard to put into words why, it just goes against our orthographic sensibilities.  It doesn’t just feel wrong, it feels stupid, like Homer Simpson saying “gym” like /gaim/.  Or like a kindergartender who hasn’t yet learned that final “e” is silent in words like “Dave”.

 

After all how do you pronounce “Dave”?  That’s a fun example, on account of the most famous Dave in American frontier history: Davy Crockett.  A lot of people say that Mr Crockett himself (who was a congressman thank you very much!) had too much self-respect to ever call himself Davy—that he insisted on the proper name of David.  Indeed, that is what he calls himself in his autobiography, A Narrative of the Life of David Crockett (my edition carries the less dignified retitle King of the Wild Frontier: An Autobiography by Davy Crockett).  But the circumstantial evidence is that he did sometimes call himself Davy... except you might easily miss it, because he spelled it “Dave”.  As in \dāvē\, as in “day-vee”, as in you do pronounce the final long “e”.  This at least is suggested by Paul Andrew Hutton in The Undiscovered Country (the history book, not the Star Trek film).

 

A better example is the name of Iowa.  This was originally meant to be pronounced like Ioway—a spelling which is still used when referring to the eponymous Indian tribe from Iowa (personally I like that there’s a way to distinguish the two).  In other words it was said with all three vowels having their Webster’s-style long values: \Īōwā\ - “EYE-oh-way”.  This is how my grandfather used to say it.  But for me and my generation (and I assume you as well), it just feels wrong to put a single “long ā” at the end of a word.  We can do it for “long ē” in words like psyche; we can do it for “long ī” in words like alibi.  But we don’t do it with word-final “ā”.  At least not anymore—watch the opening scene of 1942’s Casablanca though, and hear the narrator pronounce visa as “vee-zay”.

 

Sometimes this even goes the opposite direction.  The name “Kiowa” has always had more or less the pronunciation it has today, as indicated by early Spanish spellings of the name and its form in various other Native American languages.  But in the old days, occasionally people pronounced it like “Kioway”—this presumably was because of a mistaken assumption that it ought to rhyme with “Iowa(y)”.  Robert Duvall says it like “Kioway” in Lonesome Dove, for instance, though whether as a conscious character affectation or because Duvall himself (who was kind of an old-fashioned guy) pronounced it like that, I don’t know.

 

Minding the spoken-written distinction like this can help you avoid certain mistakes.  I’ve written before how the “Quiohuan” tribe spoken of in the Spanish and French records of the southwest were not the Kiowa because—among other reasons—that theory relies upon assuming an English pronunciation of the letter “i” in those names.  A similar fallacy is the idea that the “Chien” Indians recorded from the Minnesota area were the Cheyenne on account of “chien” being French for “dog” and the Cheyenne having a warrior fraternity called the Dog Soldiers.  The Chien were the Cheyenne, yes, but only because “Chien” is an anomalous English spelling of the name (with a “long ī”), and it has nothing to do with dogs.

 

The Last of the Mohicans features a character named Chingachkook whose name—in the film version at least—is pronounced /čɪŋgəčgʊk/.  James Fenimore Cooper found the word in an old Lenape dictionary, it means “Big Snake”.  But that dictionary had been written by Moravian missionaries, and it used a German-based orthography which employed the “ch” digraph to write the velar fricative /x/ (the sound of Scottish loch, Spanish baja, German achtung).  A modern phonetic orthography would render this word as “xinkɔxkook”.  If this name had ever been borrowed directly into English then it would probably have sounded like “Kingakuck” or something like that.  Whether James Fenimore Cooper himself was aware of this I don’t know, but the actor Russell Means (what, him again??) evidently was not.

 

The same kind of mistake happens in the more recent French and Indian War film Young Washington, which features a character (and real life person) named Half-King Tanacharison.  In the film this is pronounced /tænəčəˈrisən/ ~ “tă-nuh-tcha-REE-sin” but you can tell that this is wrong by comparing the various ways it was written by contemporary English (Tanaghrisson, Tanacharisson, etc) and French (Tanahisson, Thaninhison, etc) [note B].  I haven’t found a linguistic analysis of this particular name, but you can infer from these spellings that in the original Iroquoian it had /hr/ in the middle.  Clusters like/hr/ feel awkward to English speakers—we don’t like having /h/ after a vowel like this—so in old names such as this one the /h/ was occasionally written with the guttural-looking “gh” for emphasis.  You see this, for instance, in Joseph Brant’s translations of the Bible into Mohawk.  The word for “Bible” itself Brant wrote as “kaghyadoghseradogeaghty”, corresponding to modern Mohawk kahiatonhseratokénhti.

 

Genesis 1 in Joseph Brant's 1787 translation (left) and in Harvey Satewas Gabriel's 2023 translation (right).

 

The records of 17th century Seneca show it to have been a “normal” Iroquoian language, however over the following two centuries it experienced some pretty drastic sound changes.  One of these changes was that the cluster /hr/ first was reduced to /r/ and then disappeared entirely.  Tanacharison is suspected to have been a Seneca (possibly by adoption) so it’s not unlikely his name was Seneca, and thus you can observe that some spellings preserve an older form of it (e.g. Tanacharison) while others have the newer form (Tanahisson).  The former may have come from a conservative Seneca dialect which hadn’t yet undergone these sound changes, or maybe it was the same name rendered in a related Iroquois language.  Meanwhile amongst the English, that /h/ situated awkwardly after a vowel was hardened into a “k” resulting in a pronunciation probably more like /tanak(ə)risən/.  This is the more historically accurate pronunciation of the name—at least the English version of it.

 

There are other examples of /h/ hardening to a /k/ after a vowel.  “Schenectady” comes from the Mohawk word skahnehtá:ti meaning “beyond the pine trees” and uses both English strategies for dealing with pesky aitches: the first /hn/ cluster was turned into /n/, and the second /ht/ cluster was hardened into /kt/.  Other examples show us that at least some English speakers, though, were trying to keep those h’s intact.  “Caughnawaga” comes from the Mohawk kahnawà:ke meaning “place of the rapids”; it uses the same <gh> spelling used by Joseph Brant.  You can also tell from the Mohawk that it was pronounced like “Caughnawagay”, so it’s another example of the “Ioway” phenomenon.  Both details have been lost in the modern English pronunciation “kah-nah-WAH-ga”.

 

Moving further west... There is a place in Minnesota called Mendota, whose name in the Dakota language is Bdóte.  There’s a noticeable similarity between these two names, but the truth is that “Mendota” is more than just an imperfect imitation of the original Bdóte—in fact the original version of the name didn’t much resemble either the modern English or Dakota versions.  Written sources from the early 1800s attest that the sound which is /d/ in modern Dakota was originally a prenasalized /ⁿd/.  This was true even in the name of the tribe itself, which Joseph Nicollet recorded was in his time pronounced like “Ndakotah”.  Another example is from the journals of Lewis & Clark, where the Mdewakanton band of Sioux are referred to as the “Mindawarcarton”—meaning that at the time, it was pronounced in Dakota as Mⁿdewakanton (or technically: Mⁿdewákhaŋthuŋwaŋ).

 

In modern Dakota, native speakers of the Mdewakanton dialect call themselves Bdewákhaŋthuŋwaŋ, but capable linguists in the 19th century recorded this form as Mdewákhaŋthuŋwaŋ.  This is due to yet another sound change which Dakota underwent during the early 1900s: the consonant cluster which was originally /mⁿd/ and later /md/ was evolved yet again into /bd/.

 

So we can see now what happened with Mendota and Bdóte.  In the early 1800s this name was pronounced by both the Anglo-Americans and the Sioux as /m(ə)ndote/, which the former wrote as “Mendota” (as in dictionary-style: \mĕndōtā\).  As happened with Iowa and Caughnawaga, the “ay” vowel was later lost so that the name is now pronounced “men-DOH-ta”.  Meanwhile in the Dakota language, the old Mⁿdóte was altered via regular sound change to Mdóte by the mid-19th century and then again to Bdóte by the mid-20th.  So the two languages carried the name off in different directions, even though originally they were quite similar.

 

Another example, this one varying between dialects rather than over time.  The Cree of historic times had various names for their enemies to the west, principally the Blackfeet whom the speakers of the Plains Cree dialect referred to as Ayahčiyinew.  Because of a pattern you find among the Cree dialects (and of Ojibwe), words which have an “l” in one dialect will instead have an “n” in another, a “y” in another, a “th” in another, etc.  Thus early documents referring to the Blackfoot as the “Archithinue” are representing this name according to the Woods Cree dialect: Ayahčithiniw (or Ayahčiðiniw).  Another spelling of this name is “Iactchejlini” which at first doesn’t look like the same name at all—but in fact it comes from an “l”-dialect (this time of Ojibwe) variant: Ayahčilini.  The spelling of <Iactchejlini> has the letter “j” standing as an alternate for “i”; the initial letter “I” standing for its schoolhouse-long value of “eye”; and the awkward-in-English /hč/ cluster apparently being hardened into /kč/, similar to what happened with Tanacharisson and Schanectady.

 

Ayahčiyinew (et var) is sometimes translated as “slave”.  I’m not sure how accurate this is—the Handbook of North American Indians suggests that it’s not—but the Cree did refer to their Athabaskan-speaking enemies to the north using other words for slave.  The name of a foreign ethnic group also being a word for slave has ample precedent in world history, most notably in the origin of the word “slave” itself which has the same root as the word “Slav”.  But the English in Canada, who tended to take the side of their Cree partners in the fur trade, referred to these Athabaskans as the “Slaves” as well.  This is where Great Slave Lake in Canada gets its name.

 

But an unexpected detail.  There is an Athabaskan group in Canada which is still often called the Slave tribe, though in this case the pronunciation of their name isn’t what you would expect.  It’s pronounced with the dictionary-style phonetics of \slāvē\ with a “long ē” in the second syllable.  Sometimes you see it written as “Slavey” to make this pronunciation more explicit.  But why does it have that pronunciation anyway, if they’re named for being the victims of Cree slaving raids?  Because the “ey” ending is actually based on the French suffix –ais, as in Francais, Anglais, Japonais.  So, they took the English translation of a Cree word, slapped a French suffix on it, and then gave that an English spelling which now has a counterintuitive pronunciation.

 

And on that note, this stuff happens in Spanish and French too.  Sometimes you get a name like “Nez Perce” where the pronunciation has been anglified and spelling-pronunciation-ified from its original “nay pehr-say”—but you shouldn’t always assume this is what’s going on, if a name looks like it has a French spelling but isn’t pronounced as a Parisian would.  Take Des Moines for instance.  Have you ever wondered why this isn’t pronounced “de mwaan”?  It’s not a mistake: it originally means “[place] at the mooyinkweena” referring to a tribe referred to by the Miami-Illinois Indians in their own language as (for reasons that aren’t quite clear) the “Shitfaces”.  In general, the variety of French spoken in colonial America didn’t have the modern pronunciation of <oi> as “wah” as in C’est moi—instead it was like “weh” or “way”.  Hence the pronunciation of other American French terms like travois.  The case of “Iroquois” seems a bit ambiguous to me, however, since it likely derives from a Basque trade jargon term hilokoa or “killers”.

 

French also differs from English and Spanish in that it uses <ch> to write the sound of “sh”.  There is a small tribe in Louisiana called the Chitimacha whose name the locals now pronounce like /čɪtiˈmačə/ “chitty-MAH-cha” or /čɪtəˈmačə/ “chitta-MAH-cha”.  How it was pronounced in the 1700s is more difficult to work out—for one it doesn’t seem to be a native Chitimacha expression itself—but in the early 1900s it was pronounced closer to how you’d expect if you take it to have French spelling, /šɪtiməˈšɔ/ “shitty-ma-SHAW”.  This at least is how Mary Haas pronounced it; she was married to Morris Swadesh, the linguist who documented the language from its final speakers, so she would know.  According to scuttlebutt on the old Siouan Mailing List, the modern pronunciation with an English affricate “ch” is not just a happenstance spelling pronunciation—it was a deliberate change made by the now English-speaking Chitimachas, because they didn’t want their tribal name to begin with “shitty”.

 

But things aren’t always this simple.  The French could spell a name with <tch> if they wanted to really emphasize that it had the sound of a hard affricate like English “ch”.  An early French spelling of <Tchioutimachus> thus implies that Chitimacha was originally said like “ch”.  And if the name does come—as has been claimed—from Choctaw šotiʼ-imą́šah, then that means the local pronunciation of this name has gone from having an initial “sh” to an initial “ch” and back to “sh” and then back again to “ch”.  On the other hand, colonial French spelling isn’t always dependable like this.  For some reason the name of Natchitoches is also written with a hard-looking <tch>, despite the fact that it comes from the Caddo word nashit’ush with a soft “sh”.  There appear to be depths to this that I don’t grasp.

 

A similar thing happened with the name of the Hopi.  Prior to the 1890s this tribe was generally referred to as the Moqui—and not just by outsiders either: their own name for themselves was Moqui.  The original pronunciation of this was as Mokwi which, when the Spaniards arrived in the 16th century, they wrote as “Moqui”.  In the conventions of modern Spanish, this would be written as “Mocui” because the alternative (“Moqui”) implies a pronunciation of Moki.  But in the old days Spanish used <qu> to write kw, as Latin and English do—so words like cualquiera were written as qualquiera.  What this meant for the Moqui was that their name as written was ambiguous, and so... eventually... the Spanish adopted the spelling pronunciation of Moki.  This pronunciation was later taken up by Americans as well.  Problem is, in the tribal language the word moki means “dead”, and some folks took issue with that.  So in the early 1900s, the anthropologist Jesse Walter Fewkes suggested the tribe change their name to Hopi, and the rest is history [note C].

 

From an 18th century edition of Cabeza de Vaca's Naufragios. Note the use of "quatro" instead of modern "cuatro".

 

This means also that in the recent film Horizon (which takes place in 1863), when Sam Worthington’s character refers to the “Hopi” this is a historical error.

 

Article on the Moqui/Hopi tribe, from Drake's 1884 abridgment of Schoolcraft.

 

Mainstream info sources will just straight up lie to you about this, by the way.  Web articles and museum placards will claim that “Moqui” was a derogatory term applied to the Hopi by their enemies because it means “the dead ones”.  This is false.  Moqui was in fact the Hopi’s name for themselves, it’s just that it matters how you pronounce it.  Others will also blame the Americans for originally misreading “moqui” as /moki/ though this seems unlikely to me, as it is a Spanish spelling pronunciation.  This is parcell with a tendency to insist that all traditional tribonyms are derogatory in origin—as examples like “Shitfaces” and "Slave(y)" show this sometimes is true, but certainly not always, and when it is it usually has origins with a rival neighboring tribe.

 

Words like qualquiera are just the tip of the iceberg though.  The Spanish language has gone through a few spelling and pronunciation changes over the past five centuries which make reading colonial names a bit trickier than their French and English counterparts.  The simplified version is this:  Back in the 15th century or so, the letter x stood for the sound “sh” and the letter j (or g before i or e) stood for the sound “zh”.  These sounds then merged in Spanish so that both were pronounced “sh” which could be written with either <x> or <j>.  Another sound change then happened which changed the “sh” sound to the velar fricative /x/.  After this there was a spelling reform which changed most of the words containing “x” (such as hixo ‘son’ and axedrez ‘chess’) so that now they were written with “j” (hijo, ajedrez).  Thus Spanish went through the following stages.

 

            1. <j> = /zh/,  <x> = /sh/

            2. <j> and <x> = /sh/

            3. <j> and <x> = /x/

            4. <j> = /x/, and <x> not used much

 

Certain proper names, however, were allowed to keep their written x’es.  Like “México”.  This name comes from the old Aztec name for the heartland of their empire, which they called Mēšiʼko.  In colonial Nahuatl this name was written as <mexico> and was, at first, only lightly hispanified into the pronunciation /mešiko/, which sounds like “Meshico”.  When Spanish turned all of its “sh” sounds into /x/ this included the Spanish pronunciation of “Mexico” which thus now had the pronunciation you’ve heard that resembles “Mehico”.  Note that this sound change happened only in Spanish—it did not happen to Nahuatl, whose speakers continued then and now to call the country Mēšiʼko.  Meanwhile in English, the word was at an early date given a spelling pronunciation of “Meksico” which is how we say it to this day.

 

Texas is another example.  This name comes from the Caddo word tayshaʼ meaning ‘friend’, pronounced like /tɛyšaʔ/ ~ “TAY-sha”.  The final “s” put at the end is the Spanish plural suffix.  The Caddo version of this name ends in a glottal stop which neither Spanish nor English really have, so this name was pronounced by the Spaniards of the early 17th century as /tešas/ ~ “TAY-shahss”.  Then the usual sound changes happened, turning this into /texas/ ~ “TAY-hahss”; while once again in English the name received a spelling pronunciation sounding like “Teksas”.  What makes this different from the Mexico example is that Spanish often does spell it with the replacement consonant “j”—especially in derivative words like tejano.

 

Sometimes you need to cross-reference the same name written in different languages in order to figure out how it originally sounded.  The extinct Jumano tribe of Texas are now referred to as the /humano/ because that is what the obviously Spanish-shaped spelling implies.  But in earlier Spanish they were called the “Xumana”—and the time period makes it unsure whether this spelling was stamped according to the pre- or post-sound change rules.  In other words, was it Humana or Shumana?  The French writings refer to this same tribe as the “Chouman”—thus we can triangulate that the name originally began with the sound “sh” . . . Right?  Well actually, in this case it’s particularly sticky, because the early Spaniards also wrote the name of these Indians as “Humana”.  So the truth is that I really don’t know, but it’s an interesting problem.

 

More archaic relics of Spanish can be found in that semi-primordial era of north-of-the-Rio colonialism: the 1500s.  The town of Waxhaw in North Carolina is located not far from the location of an Indian settlement recorded in the records of the Juan Pardo expedition as “Gueça”.  The Spanish language having no /w/ consonant, it was often represented as <gu> or <hu> (as in “Naguatex” from Caddo Nawidish).  But the letter ç here is more interesting.  This letter corresponds to “z” in modern Spanish orthography—pronounced “s” in Latin America and “th” in Europe, both of these deriving from an original pronunciation of “ts”.  Thus “Gueça” and “Waxhaw” are plainly two different spellings of the same name, and this fact in turn informs us that the Spanish were still using ç to write “ts” (very similar to “ks” in the English version) and that the English name originally had dictionary-style long ay in the first syllable (Wāxhaw)—though locals now pronounce the name as “whack saw” [note D].

 

French has been a bit more stable as compared to Spanish, at least since 1604 when it became a permanent fixture in North America.  But rewind a further century and you’re in another realm: of the four primary sources of the De Soto expedition, three are written in Spanish and the fourth in a variety of French sufficiently outdated that it’s still referred to as “Middle French”.  (English left its “Middle” period a century earlier, and “Middle Spanish” isn’t really a thing.)  Other records come from the attempts by Cartier and Roberval to found a colony on the Saint Lawrence in the 1530s.  These include the very early records of a still-not-quite identified Iroquoian language spoken at the indigenous settlements of Hochelaga and Stadacona.  I’ll let Wallace Chafe explain:

 

“The Stadaconan sounds were filtered through the phonetic expectations of a speaker of French, a fact that led to many inevitable distortions of what was actually heard. [... V]arious changes in pronunciation were taking place in the French language at the time, and French orthography had not become stabilized.  For example, for at least some French speakers the sound represented earlier by the letter s after a vowel had been replaced by a lengthening of the vowel, but the s was still being used as an indication of the lengthening, as in teste.  Later the s was replaced by a circumflex accent over the lengthened vowel, as in tête.  This orthographic situation may help to explain spellings like anondasco for ‘legs’ in the first vocabulary, a spelling that makes sense only if the s marked a lengthening of the preceding a rather than an actual s sound.  The word can be reconstructed as having sounded something like anǫdá·kǫ·.”

(Wallace Chafe, in Decentring the Renaissance, 2001)

 

By the following century neither French nor Spanish nor English had a way to distinguish quantitative length in vowels.  The Germans still do it though: they use h and doubled consonants, as in fallen [falən] versus fahlen [fa:lən].  In 1839 the traveler Prince Maximilian of Wied was thus able to record long vowels in the Mandan language—something that English speaking observers (including linguists) didn’t reliably do until well into the 20th century.  For example, Maximilian wrote the Mandan word for turkey (máanu) as “máhnu”, with the acute accent marking stress and the h marking vowel length (Ryan Kasak, A Grammar of Mandan, 2024:146).

 

And to finally get back to Wahunsonacock: I cannot tell you for certain how it was pronounced, in either 17th century Powhatan or 17th century Early-Modern Virginia English.  But given the spelling conventions of the time laid out in this post, I would expect that the first two syllables were probably more like “wah-hun” /wahʌn/ or “way-hun” /wehʌn/, rather than “wah-hoon” as the documentary narrator said it.  A more recent example of the narrator’s mistake comes from an early 20th century orthography of Tlingit.  From James Crippen’s dissertation:

 

“The NS1 orthography [of Tlingit] is characterized by a very English-like set of vowel symbols . . . Rather infamously, the street called ‘Yandukin Drive’ by the airport in Juneau derives from a representation in the NS1 orthography.  The Tlingit term is actually yaa ndakín /jà: ntàqʰín/ ‘it is flying along’, which in the NS1 orthography would be either <Yandukín> or <Yah ndukín>.  This spelling has unfortunately led people to pronounce it as [jæn.ˈdʌkɪn] or [jæn.ˈdu.kɪn] in English, and it is uninterpretable by modern Tlingit readers.”

(The Syntax in Tlingit Verbs, p 842)

 

Crippen describes this in disapproving terms, but if “Yan-dookin’ Drive” has indeed developed common currency among the Juneauans, then of course... that is its name.

 

Yandukin Drive in Juneau, Alaska. This photo was reportedly taken by a mysterious man wearing black.

 

 

 

Notes:

 

[note A]:  One of my biggest pet peeves around this topic doesn’t come from American history at all, it comes from fiction.  On the tv show Game of Thrones, the Dothraki word “khaleesi” is always pronounced how it looks when the characters are speaking English (or “Westerosi” I guess), but when there is a scene spoken in Dothraki this word is pronounced /χale:si/.  When professional conlanger David Peterson was making the language for the show, he clearly saw this word “khaleesi” and figured that “ee” must be a quantitatively long version of /e/, as it would be in a technical orthography devised by a linguist.  But why would you assume the narrator of A Song of Ice and Fire is using a technical linguistic orthography for anything?  Surely the word as written in the text is just how the characters in-universe would write it in English/Westerosi, and they’re not linguists either.  This is a shoddy job of reverse-engineering a language.  Contrast it with the truly inspired decision by Marc Okrand to say that the “kl” in the word “Klingon” was based on English-speakers in the Federation mishearing a lateral affricate /tɬ/, based on real world precedents which I’ll discuss in part 3.

 

[note B]:  Historians usually settle on either “Tanacharison” or “Tanaghrisson” but I’m not sure anyone ever actually called him by the latter.  I wanted to check which variants of his name were given by French vs English authors so I did a little digging, but I could not find the spelling of “Tanaghrisson” anywhere in the writings of George Croghan, Conrad Weiser, George Washington, Christopher Gist, Marquis Duquesne, Philippe-Thomas Joncaire, William Johnson, or any of the sources listed by the Dictionary of Canadian Biography.  Nevertheless most historians treat it like the default spelling, idk.  The ones I did find are: (French) Thaninhison, Thaninhisson, thanenhisshon, thanenhisson, Thaninhison, Tanahisson, Tanarisson, thanenhison; (English) Thonariss, Thonarison, Thonorison, Tanachrisson; (English written by a German) Thanayieson, Tannghrishon, Tanacharisson, Tanacarisson.  “Tannghrishon” is probably a misprint of Tanaghrishon.  The DCB lists a “Deanaghrison” and a “Johonerissa” but I don’t know where they’re from either.  I haven’t asked any specialists about this name’s etymology.  It looks like the form might be close to /thanęhrisǫ/.  Initial tha- would be the duplicative prefix t- followed by the 3rd person singular masculine subject prefix ha- and the final –ǫ would be the continuative aspect suffix.  –nęh- also looks like the incorporated noun ‘corn’ (cf other regional names like Cornplanter and Cornstalk).  Also, the normal modern Mohawk word for Bible is ohiatonhseratokénhti, but initial o- versus ka- in Iroquoian is not very consequential.  The Seneca sound change is discussed in Charles Julian’s doctoral dissertation A History of the Iroquoian Languages (U of Manitoba, 2010).

 

[note C]:  In the Hopi language both words actually have a long o vowel (Mookwi, mooki).  Another tribe that changed its name because of an anthropologist are the so-called “Nakota” Sioux, but the details are a bit different and anyway it’s a story for another time.  It’s also worth pointing out that for some reason the “exonyms bad” faction seem to only apply that rule to English, and are unbothered by Cheyenne-speakers calling the Comanche “Šé’šenovotsétaneo’o” instead of Nʉmʉnʉʉ, Ojibwe-speakers calling the Sioux “Bwaanag” instead of Dakhóta, or Delaware-speakers calling the Iroquois “Opànuwàk” instead of Haudenosaunee, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

 

[note D]:  Regarding the Spanish sibilants: alongside the changes to x and j, there was a parallel shift in Spanish—of which I know less of the details—which gave rise to the present state of Latin American seseo versus Castillian thetheo.  Both variants descend from a state of affairs more like modern day Basque, where “z” (of which “ç” is an older form) is a laminal /s/ and “s” is a retracted apical /s/.  This only occasionally pops up, such as in the Nahuas calling the Castillian Spaniards the caxtīllān because they apparently perceived 16th-century Spanish’s apical “s” as being more similar to their own /š/ than to their /s/.  Also, for the record I am not really convinced by Frank Siebert’s Catawba etymology for Gueça/Waxhaw—which is why I didn’t mention it—but he said it was from wátsa·ʔ (Esaw dialect) ~ wítsa·ʔ (Saraw dialect) “crest of hair” (given in Blair Rudes, Place Names of Cofitachequi, 2004).

 

Various other etymologies are mostly from the Handbook of North American Indians, from William Bright’s Native American Placenames of the United States, or from Mii Dash Geget (p.c.).