The tribal and totemic divisions are barely remembered, and the ancient prohibitions about endogamous marriage have fallen completely into desuetude. Mr. Anthony’s term for totem, or sub-tribe, is w’aloch'ke; as, tulpenaloch'ke, the Turtle totem. The name Minsi, he believes, is an abbreviation of minachsinink, the place of broken stones, referring to the mountains north of the Lehigh river, where his ancestors had their homes. The Wonalacht'go of the early historians he identifies with the Nanticokes, and translates it “people following the waves;” that is, living near the ocean.
The chieftaincy of the tribe is still, in theory, hereditary in one family, and in the female line. The ordinary term sakima, sachem, is not in use among the Minsi, who call their chief kikay, or kitschikikay (kitschi, great; kikay, old, or old man: the elderman, or alderman, of the Saxons).
Some peculiarities of the language deserve to be noted.
The German alphabet, employed by the Moravians to reduce it to writing, answered so well that the Moravian missionary, Rev. Mr. Hartmann, at present in charge of the New Fairfield Reservation, Ontario, who does not understand a word of Delaware, told me he had read the books printed in the native tongue to his congregation, and they understood him perfectly. But I soon detected two or three sounds which had escaped Zeisberger and his followers. There is a soft th which the German ear could not catch, and a kth which was equally difficult, both of frequent occurrence. There is also a slight breathing between the possessives n’, my, k’, thy, w’, his, and the names of the things possessed, which the missionaries sometimes disregarded, and sometimes wrote as a full vowel. But after a little practice I had rarely any difficulty in pronouncing the words in an intelligible manner. This I was obliged to do with the whole dictionary, for although Mr. Anthony speaks his language with perfect ease, he does not read or write it, and has no acquaintance with German or its alphabet.
On one point I cross-examined him carefully. It is well-known to linguists that in Algonkin grammar the verb undergoes a vowel change of a peculiar character, which usually throws the sentence into an indefinite or dubitative form. This is a very marked trait, recognized early by the missionary Eliot and others, and the omission of all reference to it by Zeisberger in his Grammar of the Lenâpé has been commented on as a serious oversight. Well, after all my questions, and after explaining the point fully to Mr. Anthony, he insisted that no such change takes place in Delaware verbs. I read to him the forms in Zeisberger’s Grammar which are supposed to indicate it, but he explained them all by other reasons, mere irregularities or erroneous expressions.
The intricacies of the Lenâpé verb have never yet been solved, and it is now doubtful if they ever will be, for the language is fast changing and disappearing, at least in both reservations in Canada, and also among the representatives of the tribe at their settlement in Kansas. It is not now, and Mr. Anthony assured me that, so far as he knew, it never was, a custom for parents to correct their children in speaking the language. Probably this is true of most uncivilized tribes. The children of such learn their exceedingly complicated languages with a facility and accuracy which is surprising to the cultivated mind. I can say from experience, that no child learns to speak pure English without incessant correction from parents and teachers.
The general result of my conversations with Mr. Anthony on the grammar of his language led me to estimate at a lower value the knowledge of it displayed in the works of Zeisberger, Ettwein, and Heckewelder. The first and last named no doubt spoke it fluently in some fashion; but they had not the power to analyze it, nor to detect its finer shades of meaning, nor to appreciate many refinements in its word-building, nor to catch many of its semi-notes.
To give an example:—
Heckewelder gave Duponceau a compound which has often been quoted as a striking instance of verbal synthesis. It is kuligatschis, and is analyzed by Duponceau thus: k, possessive pronoun, second person singular; uli, abbreviation of wulit, pretty; gat, last syllable of wichgat, foot or paw; chis, diminutive termination; in all, “thy pretty little paw.” Now, there is no such word in Lenâpé as wichgat. “His foot” is w’uchsüt, where the initial w is the possessive, and does not belong in the word for foot. But in all likelihood this was not in the compound heard by Heckewelder. What he heard was k’wulinachkgis, from, k, possessive; wulit, pretty; nachk, hand, or paw of an animal; gis, diminutive termination. He lost the peculiar whistled w and the nasalized n, sounds unknown to Germans. Duponceau’s statement that gat is the last syllable of the word for foot is totally erroneous. I am convinced that much of the excessive synthesis, so called, in the Lenâpé arises from a lack of appreciation on the part of the whites of delicate phonetic elements. If I had heard many more of Mr. Anthony’s analyses of compounds, I believe I should have reached the conclusion that synthesis in Lenâpé means little beyond juxtaposition with euphonic elision.