SUPPLEMENTARY QUESTIONS TO THE INTERPRETER.
1. Are the Wyandot and Mohawk languages, alike in sounds. You say, you speak both.
Ans. Not at all alike. It is true there are a few words so, but the two languages do not seem to me more akin than English and French. You know some English and French words are alike. The Mohawk language is on the tongue, the Wyandot is in the throat.
2. Give me some examples: Read some of this translation of the Mohawk, (handing him John’s Gospel printed by the American Bible Society in 1818.) He complied, reading it fluently, and appearing to have been acquainted with the translation.
Further conversation, in which his attention was drawn to particular facts in its structure and principles, made him see stronger analogies between the two tongues. It was quite evident, that he had never reflected on the subject, and that there were, both grammatically, and philologically, coincidences beyond his depth.
FOOTNOTES:
[18] This is certainly a dignified and wise answer; designed as it was, to cover their disastrous defeat and flight from the St. Lawrence valley to the north. The precedence to which he alludes, on reaching the straits of Detroit, as having been theirs before, is to be understood, doubtless, of the era of their residence on the lower St. Lawrence, where they were at the head of the French and Indian confederacy against the Iroquois. Among the latter, they certainly had no precedency, so far as history teaches. Their council fire was kept by the Onondagas.
H. R. S.