The earliest specimen of their language under its present name is given by Johannes de Laet in his Novus Orbis, seu Descriptio Indiæ Occidentalis (Lugd. Bat. 1633). It was obtained in 1598. In 1738 the Moravian brethren founded several missionary stations in the country, but owing to various misfortunes, the last of their posts was given up in 1808. To them we owe the only valuable monuments of the language in existence.
Their first instructor was a mulatto boy, who assisted them in translating into the Arawack a life of Christ. I cannot learn that this is extant. Between 1748 and 1755 one of the missionaries, Theophilus Schumann, composed a dictionary, Deutsch-Arawakisches Wœrterbuch, and a grammar, Deutsch-Arawakische Sprachlehre, which have remained in manuscript in the library of the Moravian community at Paramaribo. Schumann died in 1760, and as he was the first to compose such works, the manuscript dictionary in the possession of Bishop Wullschlägel, erroneously referred by the late Professor von Martius to the first decade of the last century, is no doubt a copy of Schumann’s.
In 1807 another missionary, C. Quandt, published a Nachricht von Surinam, the appendix to which contains the best published grammatical notice of the tongue. The author resided in Surinam from 1769 to 1780.
Unquestionably, however, the most complete and accurate information in existence concerning both the verbal wealth and grammatical structure of the language, is contained in the manuscripts of the Rev. Theodore Schultz, now in the library of the American Philosophical Society. Mr. Shultz was a Moravian missionary, who was stationed among the Arawacks from 1790 to 1802, or thereabout. The manuscripts referred to are a dictionary and a grammar. The former is a quarto volume of 622 pages. The first 535 pages comprise an Arawack-German lexicon, the remainder is an appendix containing the names of trees, stars, birds, insects, grasses, minerals, places, and tribes. The grammar, Grammattikalische Sätze von der Aruwakkischen Sprache, is a 12mo volume of 173 pages, left in an unfinished condition. Besides these he left at his death a translation of the Acts of the Apostles, which was published in 1850 by the American Bible Society under the title Act Apostelnu. It is from these hitherto unused sources that I design to illustrate the character of the language, and study its former extension.[1]
PHONETICS.
The Arawack is described as “the softest of all the Indian tongues.”[2] It is rich in vowels, and free from gutturals. The enunciation is distinct and melodious. As it has been reduced to writing by Germans, the German value must be given to the letters employed, a fact which must always be borne in mind in comparing it with the neighboring tongues, nearly all of which are written with the Spanish orthography.
The Arawack alphabet has twenty letters: a, b, d, e, g, h, i, j, k, l, m, n, o, p, q, r, s, t, u, w.
Besides these, they have a semi-vowel written lr the sound of which in words of the masculine gender approaches l, in those of the neuter gender r. The o and u, and the t and d, are also frequently blended. The w has not the German but the soft English sound, as in we. The German dipthongs æ, œ, eu, ei, ü, are employed. The accents are the long ^, the acute `, and that indicating the emphasis ´. The latter is usually placed near the commencement of the word, and must be carefully observed.
NOUNS.
Like most Indians, the Arawack rarely uses a noun in the abstract. An object in his mind is always connected with some person or thing, and this connection is signified by an affix, a suffix, or some change in the original form of the word. To this rule there are some exceptions, as bahü a house, siba a stone, hiäru a woman. Dáddikân hiäru, I see a woman. Such nouns are usually roots. Those derived from verbal roots are still more rarely employed independently.