We meet with similar analyses in almost every published list of Indian names. Some examples have been given in the preceding pages of this paper,—as in the interpretation of 'Winnipisiogee' (p. 32) by 'the beautiful water of the high place,' s or ēs being regarded as the fractional representative of 'kees, high.' Pemigewasset has been translated by 'crooked place of pines' and 'crooked mountain pine place,'—as if k[oo]-a, 'a pine,' or its plural k[oo]-ash, could dispense in composition with its significant base, k[oo], and appear by a grammatical formative only.
6. No interpretation of a place-name is correct which makes bad grammar of the original. The apparatus of Indian synthesis was cumbersome and perhaps inelegant, but it was nicely adjusted to its work. The grammatical relations of words were never lost sight of. The several components of a name had their established order, not dependent upon the will or skill of the composer. When we read modern advertisements of "cheap gentlemen's traveling bags" or "steel-faced carpenters' claw hammers," we may construe such phrases with a latitude which was not permitted to the Algonkins. If 'Connecticut' means—as some have supposed it to mean—'long deer place,' it denotes a place where long deer abounded; if 'Piscataqua' was named 'great deer river,' it was because the deer found in that river were of remarkable size. 'Coaquanock' or, as Heckewelder wrote it, 'Cuwequenaku,' the site of Philadelphia, may mean 'pine long-place' but cannot mean 'long pine-place' or 'grove of long pine trees.' If 'Pemigewasset' is compounded of words signifying 'crooked,' 'pines,' and 'place,' it denotes 'a place of crooked pines,'—not 'crooked place of pines.'
Again—every Indian name is complete within itself. A mere adjectival or qualificative cannot serve independently, leaving the real ground-word to be supplied by the hearer. River names must contain some element which denotes 'river;' names of lakes or ponds something which stands for 'lake' or 'pond.' The Indians had not our fashion of speech which permits Hudson's River to be called 'the Hudson,' drops the word 'lake' from 'Champlain' or 'Erie,' and makes "the Alleghanies" a geographical name. This difference must not be lost sight of, in analysis or translation. Agawam or Auguan (a name given to several localities in New England where there are low flat meadows or marshes,) cannot be the equivalent of the Abnaki ag[oo]ann, which means 'a smoke-dried fish,'[96]—though ag[oo]anna-ki or something like it (if such a name should be found), might mean 'smoked-fish place.' Chickahominy does not stand for 'great corn,' nor Pawcatuck for 'much or many deer;'[97] because neither 'corn' nor 'deer' designates place or implies fixed location, and therefore neither can be made the ground-word of a place-name. Androscoggin or Amoscoggin is not from the Abnaki 'amaskohegan, fish-spearing,'[98] for a similar reason (and moreover, because the termination -hēgan denotes always an instrument, never an action or a place; it may belong to 'a fish-spear,' but not to 'fish spearing' nor to the locality 'where fish are speared.')
7. The locative post-position, -et, -it or -ut,[99] means in, at or on,—not 'land' or 'place.' It locates, not the object to the name of which it is affixed, but something else as related to that object,—which must be of such a nature that location can be predicated of it. Animate nouns, that is, names of animate objects cannot receive this affix. 'At the rock' (ompsk-ut), 'at the mountain' (wadchu-ut), or 'in the country' (ohk-it, auk-it), is intelligible, in Indian or English; 'at the deer,' 'at the bear,' or 'at the sturgeons,' would be nonsense in any language. When animate nouns occur in place-names, they receive the formative of verbals, or serve as adjectival prefixes to some localizing ground-word or noun-generic.
8. Finally,—in the analysis of geographical names, differences of language and dialect must not be disregarded. In determining the primary meaning of roots, great assistance may be had by the comparison of derivatives in nearly related languages of the same stock. But in American languages, the diversity of dialects is even more remarkable than the identity and constancy of roots. Every tribe, almost every village had its peculiarities of speech. Names etymologically identical might have widely different meanings in two languages, or even in two nations speaking substantially the same language. The eastern Algonkin generic name for 'fish' (nâma-us, Del. namai-s) is restricted by northern and western tribes to a single species, the sturgeon (Chip. namai´,) as the fish, par excellence. Attuk, in Massachusetts was the common fallow-deer,—in Canada and the north-west the caribou or reindeer. The Abnaki Indian called his dog (atié) by a name which the Chippewa gives his horse (oti-un; n'di, my horse).[100] The most common noun-generic of river names in New England (-tuk, 'tidal river') occurs rarely in those of Pennsylvania and Virginia, where it is replaced by -hanne ('rapid stream'), and is unknown to western Algonkin tribes whose streams are undisturbed by tides. The analysis of a geographical name must be sought in the language spoken by the name-givers. The correct translation of a Connecticut or Narragansett name is not likely to be attained by searching for its several components in a Chippewa vocabulary; or of the name of a locality near Hudson's River, by deriving its prefix from an Abnaki adverb and its ground-word from a Chippewa participle,—as was actually done in a recently published list of Indian names.
INDIAN NAMES.
Abagadusset, Abequaduset, [39]
Abnaki, [7]