How to Spell in Colonial America (Part 2 of 3)

=== Odd Letters ===

 

“They begane now to gather in yᵉ ſmall haruest they had; and to fittɘ vp their houſes and dwellings, against winter, being all well recouered in health & strenght; and had all things in good plenty, for as ſomɘ werɘ thus ymployed in affairs abroad; others were exerſiſɘd in fiſhing, aboutɘ codd, & baß, & other fiſh of which yᵉʸ tookɘ good storɘ, of which euery family had their portion”

— William Bradford, Of Plimoth Plantation

 

When I say “spelling in colonial America” no doubt people think of very different quirks than what I covered in part 1.  Most likely they think of archaic letter variants long since disused, like the long-ſ in words like “Congreſs” or the literal double-u/double-v in words like “VVitch”.  As this is my blog, I’m less interested in holdovers from medieval Latin and Middle English palaeography than I am in how older conventions apply to the writing of aboriginal languages here in America.  Besides, there are plenty enough websites already that explain “ye olde” or the “tironian et”.  Something which you and these websites may not realize though is that these things aren’t just hazardous to the uninitiated modern—old variants like long-ſ could at times confuse readers at the time as well.  I’ve seen a few examples here and there of ſ being mistaken for something else even in the 17th and 18th centuries.

 

1 Timothy 1:17 (1611 King James Bible)

 

The extinct Taensa tribe are known for few things: one of them is lending their name to the “Tensaw” region of Alabama, and another is because someone once wrote a fake grammar of their language in the 1800s, the existence of which probably discouraged others from ever writing a real description of the language which is thus to us unknown.  Death to all counterfeiters, etc.  They are also one of the tribes who made their first peek onto the historical stage during the 1673 expedition of Marquette and Jolliet.  On the maps and documents of this voyage, the Taensa are usually referred to as the Tahensa.

 

"Tahensa sauuages" on the 1675 "Frontenacie" map

 

This name must have also been written as Tahenſa.  You can tell by looking at later maps of the Mississippi, because evidently at some point in the copying process, someone had trouble deciphering this name.  On the following map, for instance, it very clearly says “Tahenla”.

 

"Tahenla" on the 1678 "Manitoumie" map

 

And on another, just as clear, it says “Tahenfa”:

 

"Tahenfa" on the Carte Generale

 

So maybe we can give folks some slack when they ask about James Madison and his congreffs.

 

Another letter you see on these old maps is the “ou”.  It looks a bit like the numeral 8, but strictly it should be open on top like so: ȣ.  You can see one in that first map extract: <mȣnsȣperia” east of the Mississippi river, indicating the Mosopelea (or Ofo) tribe.  As the name “ou” suggests, this letter in theory is a ligature of o and u—and in fact it originates from the Greek manuscript tradition as a shorthand form of omicron-upsilon.  Observe an example of Greek ȣ (here looking more like the oxhorn letter: ɤ) on the image below, where it’s used to write the word παρουσίασ.

 

1509 manuscript of Demetrius Triclinius (from spotlight.vatlib.it). Note also that this style does not use the word-final sigma.

 

Owing to technical limitations, it has typically been the convention to replace the letter ȣ with the numeral 8, as until recently it was hard to produce on a computer font, typewriter, or publisher’s typeface.  When not using the eight, often they would instead unstring the ligature and write out “ou”.

 

From David Costa's Miami-Illinois grammar (p379).

 

And just as people could mistake ſ even in its heyday, so too are there cases of contemporaries misinterpreting what ȣ means.  Unfortunately I don’t have any example of someone from the 1600s actually thinking it’s an eight (that would be pretty great!), but there is another reading of ȣ which many don't know about.  As Michael McCafferty points out in Native American Place-Names of Indiana, in addition to <ȣ> standing as shorthand for <ou> it was also the practice of the Jesuits to use <ȣ> to stand for <oua> (as in the French spelling of /wa/, cf. “Ouagadougou” for Wagadugu in Africa):

 

“However, early Mississippi Valley Jesuit missionaries also used “8” to signify wa and waa, and with these two additional phonological possibilities rose the specter of ambituity—for 99 percent of the people back in Québec and France appear to have had no idea that these were the possible values for the letter “8.””

(p 24)

 

Thus for instance the name of the Osage tribe—Wažáže in their own tongue and Wašaaši in Miami-Illinois—was recorded as <Ȣchagé> on maps from this period, intended as a shorthand for “Ouachagé”, which is really not a bad gallicization.  But later some copyists misinterpreted the latter as standing for its usual “ou”, and so you get renditions like “Ouchachai” on a copy of Marquette’s map (below).  Even the Handbook of North American Indians does this and wrongly cites Marquette’s name as “Ouchage”.  The French version of the name later settled upon “Osage” which, mind, they pronounced /ozaʒe/ “oh-zah-zhey”—still not that far off from the original.  But then yet again an English spelling pronunciation (yep, I’m still bolding it) took over yielding /ˈosedʒ/ “OH-sage”.

 

"Carte du Mississippi et des lacs Supérieur, Michigan et Huron" - anonymous 1675 map based on Marquette

 

See, here’s the thing—that is interesting.  Isn’t it interesting?  I think it is, how words change over time, hop from language to language.  And it's why I’m so opposed to the idea that language and culture should be made uniform and pure, free of all contaminant—that we must all use only versions of names that are most felicitous to their originals.  This would rid every language, not just English, of historical richness.  "Osage" tells a story; every word tells a story, and I for one prefer that language stay interesting that way, rather than a mere someone's idea of right.  But I digress.

 

This is one I’ve written about before, but: the first recorded attestation of the name of the Assiniboine tribe may be another example of ȣ being misread by one of McCafferty’s ninety-nine percenters.  In the Jesuit Relations of 1640, this tribe is mentioned under the slightly unusual spelling of “Assinipour”.  Recall what I said in part 1 about the r~l~n (etc.) isogloss in Cree and Ojibwe dialects.  The standard name of “Assiniboine” comes from the Ojibwe Ahsiniipwaan meaning “stone enemy”—or more narrowly “stone Sioux”—specifically in the modern Odawa dialect.  An equivalent form Ahsiniipwaal from the Old Odawa dialect gives other versions of the name such as “Assenipoils” on this map:

 

"Lac des Assenipoils" on 1704 Hennepin map

 

“Assinipour” must therefore come from the Old Algonquin dialect, in which it was pronounced as Ahsiniipwaar.  But the last syllable in “Assinipour” doesn’t quite match (and they usually did get this part right), unless we suppose that the copyist of the Jesuit Relations was reading off of a (now lost) manuscript in which the name was written as <Assinipȣr> and intended to be read as “Assinipouar”.  But the copyist didn’t know this, and so incorrectly transcribed the letter ȣ as “ou”. [note A]

 

All that said, though, it’s probably a mistake to think of ȣ as just an archaic letterform along the likes of “long ſ” or “r-rotunda”.  Even in those days it was not a part of the regular French alphabet, and it was very rarely used when writing the French language itself.  Rather it was a technical character specifically used to write American Indian languages like Huron, Algonquian, Miami-Illinois, or Abenaki.  It’s likely that many Frenchmen even in the 1600s had never even heard of it.

 

Nor was ȣ the only character brought over from Greek manuscripts and used for writing these languages.  In Huron for instance, the letters chi “χ” and theta “θ” were used to represent the consonant clusters /kh/ and /th/ respectively, as they were in Classical Attic.  The reason for this is presumably because French has no native /h/ sound and thus for them the letter “h” is silent.  The educated would of course have known how the letter was used in English or German, but that didn't mean they had to as well.  So instead, when writing Huron /h/ on its own (i.e. not following k or t) they used a little tittle which resembles an apostrophe <ʽ> modeled after the Greek spiritus asper—the diacritic used to write word-initial /h/ in Greek, as in ὁπλίτης hoplítēs.

 

To this they added another symbol, which resembled the previous sign except it was written at the bottom like so: <˛>.  This may have been based on the Greek iota subscript, or alternately it might have just been a symmetrical counterpart to <ʽ>.  The pronunciation of this letter is not quite understood—the Jesuits’ own descriptions are really not helpful at all—but etymologically it represents a sound in Huron which descends from Proto-Iroquoian *k.  My own view is that in the 1600s it was a voiced velar fricative /ɣ/ (like the “soft g” in Spanish plagas).

 

The following image is from a facsimile edition of Pierre Potier’s 1745 Huron grammar.  Here the Huron phrase written <a˛eθet te ȣannenhaen> corresponds roughly to *aɣethet tewanęhaę. [note B]

 

 

Meanwhile, to the south in Massachusetts, the English were busy devising their own ways to write Native languages.  One of the fun facts about the history of religion and language in North America is that the first Bible ever printed in the British American colonies was not in English, nor was it even in Latin—it was in Massachusett, the language of the Wampanoag.  The Mamusse Wunneetupanatamwe Up-Biblum God or “Eliot Indian Bible” of 1663, translated by John Eliot with the aid of Wampanoag-speaking assistants.

 

Eliot’s orthography (which was not just used in his Bible, it was taken up by literate Wampanoags as well) is full of the kinds of englishisms you expect from the period: “u” was used to write schwa /ə/ (“short ŭ”), “e” was used to write /i:/ (“long ē”), and the nasal vowel /ã:/ was written with the letter “ô” (“short ŏ” sort of).  But the vowel /u:/ was written with a special invented letter: “ꝏ”.  This shape was meant to evoke “oo” and I presume the ligature was created because regular “oo” was used for two separate o’s that stood in two adjacent syllables, as in a word like <sepakehtamóonk>.

 

Because “ꝏ” has historically been as difficult as “ȣ” for fonts and typewriters to handle, it’s become a convention to convert it into the numeral 8 when citing Wampanoag texts.  This may have the unfortunate side-effect of making some folks think that Wampanoag used the letter ȣ like Huron or Abenaki—but no, it doesn’t.  Or at least, it didn’t.  The modern written standard as promoted by the Wampanoag (or “Wôpanâak”) tribe uses mostly the same orthography devised by Eliot, except that they too have adopted the numeral 8 as a convenient alternative to ꝏ.  For demonstration, here are the first two verses of Genesis, from the Eliot Bible  [note C]:

 

 

“WEſke kutchiſsik ayum God Keſuk kah Ohke.  Kah Ohke mô matta kuhkenauunneunkquttinnꝏ kah monteagunninno, kah pohkenum woſkeche mꝏnôi, kah Naſhauanit popomſhau woſkeche nippekontu.”

 

In a technical orthography:

 

Wəskī-kəčəhsək ayəm God kīsək kāh ahkəy.  Kāh ahkəy mą̄ mata kəhkīnawənyą̄kʷatənū kāh mą̄tʸākʷənənū, kāh pahkənəm waškīčī-mūną̄āy, kāh nāhšāwanət papą̄mšāw waškīčī-nəpīhką̄htʸəw.

 

And in modern Wôpanâak spelling:

 

“Wushkee-kuchuhsuk ayum God keesuk kâh ahkuy.  Kâh ahkuy mô mata kuhkeenawuneôqatun8 kâh môtyâqunun8, kâh pahkunum washkeechee-m8nôyây, kâh nâhshâwanut papômshâw washkeechee-nupeehkôhtyuw.”

 

*     *     *

 

Sebastian Rasle (or “Râle”) used the letter ȣ in a dictionary he wrote of the Abenaki language in the late 1600s and early 1700s.  Two centuries later, this was resurrected in an Abenaki text published by Henry Lorne Masta in 1932.  Masta was clearly influenced by the French precedent, and yet his use of 8 was quite different from how the algonquianist Rasle and his huronist confrères had used this letter.  Rasle had used ȣ to stand for the consonant /w/ (with a modified ȣ̈ to write/o/) whereas in Masta’s alphabet the numeral 8 represented the Abenaki nasal vowel /ã/; in Rasle’s system the nasal had been written “an̈”.  Thus for example the word for “slave” in Abenaki /awahkãn/ was written by Rasle as <aȣakan̈n> and by Masta as <awak8n>.

 

From Rasle, "Dictionary of Abenaki" ed. Pickering (1833, orig 1691-1722).

 

From Masta, "Abenaki Indian Legends, Grammar, and Place Names" (1932).

 

Masta was unusual in still using the letter ȣ (or a version of it) in an English or Anglo-Canadian context.  He was even more unusual in doing it in the twentieth century, hundreds of years after the French had abandoned this little ligature.  But because of his work, some modern Western Abenakis (like the Wampanoag) prefer to still write their language using the number 8.

 

It’s worth asking why this strange letter was ever even used here in the first place.  Pre-modern Greek manuscripts are replete with funky ligatures, which the educated friars of New France would no doubt have been familiar with . . . why did they need this one specifically?  One clue is that, depending on the language, they sometimes used ȣ to write a vowel which we would call /u/ and sometimes one which we’d call /o/.  The second clue is that most of the languages in question—Huron, Illinois, etc—don’t actually have a contrast between /u/ and /o/.  Victor Hanzeli has suggested that the sound which they wrote as ȣ was in these languages tending toward a vowel intermediate between /o/ and /u/: in other words, it was a sound which French did not natively have.  He adds that,

 

“One possible explanation is that, since many manuscripts mixed French and Latin references, the letter u would have appeared ambiguous in Algonkin words.  Another reason, perhaps the most probable, may have been that, even with other articulatory features being equal, the high-back vowels in these dialects pronounced with considerably less lip rounding than in French and were thus perceived as essentially different.  And yet their affinity with French o and ou must have been quite apparent, since most missionaries occasionally lapsed into using ȣ in French words for o or ou, e.g., sȣlier, cȣteau, faire sȣbre sault.”

(Victor Hanzeli, Missionary Linguistics in New France, p 73)

 

I assume those missionaries were the equivalent of nerds today who laik tu rait laik ðɪs after they first learn about IPA.  But otherwise, the apparent situation is that ȣ was not even meant to be used the same way it was in Greek: as simply an efficient way of writing “ou” (as in couronne or αɣαθους).  Instead it was meant to resemble and evoke both vowels at the same time—a kind of hybrid letter, rather than a mere ligature.  If so then it would not be the last time that exactly such a letter was invented in the history of American phonetic alphabets.  That I will explain further in part 3.

 

 

 

Notes:

 

[note A] – Note that the coronal consonant isogloss doesn’t always transfer neatly between Ojibwe and Cree.  This is because the consonant in question in Ojibwe descends from a merger of Proto-Algonquian *θ and *r.  In Cree no such merger occurred, and the isogloss consonant descends only from *θ.  The bwaa[r,n,l] word in Ojibwe (“enemy, Sioux”) originally had a PA *r and is pwāt in all the Cree dialects which have it.  (M.D.G. pc)

 

[note B] – People sometimes give Huron a kind of “neo-classical” pronunciation where “˛” is pronounced /y/; this is what it merged into in 20th century Wyandot, but in the 17th and 18th centuries the two sounds were quite distinct.  It’s also typical to theorize that “˛” was a kind of palatal fricative ([ç] or [ʝ]), but I simply do not find it believable that the French would have never written it as “ch” or “j/i” if this was the case.  By the way, I tried to find a fully phonemicized example in either Megan Elizabeth Lukaniec (The elaboration of verbal structure: Wendat (Huron) verb morphology, 2018) or John Steckley (various, but esp. in Anchored in Ink, ed. Loon, Steckley, Van Hal, & Peetermans, 2023) which uses these special letters, which I could locate in my mid-res PDF of the Potier manuscript (Huron Manuscripts from the Rev. Pierre Potier’s Collection, Fifteenth Report of the Bureau of Archives for the Province of Ontario, 1918-1919) for the purposes of illustration... but I couldn’t.  So there may be some missing phonetic elements, such as long vowels or glottal stops, in /aɣethet tewanęhaę/.

 

[note C] – As you can see even though Wôpanâak orthography is based on Eliot, there are numerous differences.  Modern Wôpanâak is also more than just an orthographic standard: it is a prescribed system of reconstruction for colonial Wampanoag phonology which, due to the nature of the evidence, is still not entirely understood.  The transcription in this post (provided by Mii Dash Geget) is in the Wôpanâak orthography but differs from their reconstruction in certain ways.  For the Eliot Bible in general, Campbell Nilsen’s website is quite thorough.