[6]. The writer has had his home fifty-five years in the Willamette Valley, and has never seen or known of a native to kill a deer. He has known one spend a day hunting to kill five wood rats.
[7]. This extract illustrates the condition of womanhood. Lewis and Clark write of the production of wapato in this locality as though it grew nowhere else; but it grew—yet grows—on the margins of ponds and bayous of most of the streams flowing into the Columbia west of the Cascades.
INDIAN NAMES.
Indian names and Indian words in general of the tribes of the region of the Columbia have many peculiarities, and amply repay time spent in trying to study them out. The following pretends to be only the merest beginning, and the writer has advanced only to the edges of the subject. It comprises only those names, and those meagerly and superficially, of the Lower Columbia and Willamette rivers, and these have been obtained from but two or three original sources. Those sources, however, are as reliable and intelligent as are to be found, being the recollections of Silas B. Smith, of Clatsop, and Louis Labonte, of Saint Paul, Oregon. That others may present anything they may have on the subject, and thus the stock of information be increased before those who have the original information shall have passed away, and the later investigators be left only to conjecture, is my idea in preparing this paper.
In the first place we must bear in mind a remark of Mr. Smith’s, and that is that the most of the Indian names we have incorporated into our own nomenclature are more or less altered. He says that white men always like to change the original Indian somewhat. This is no doubt true. Such a disposition arises partly from the white man’s egotism, which rejoices in showing that he can make a thing wrong if he pleases, and especially that an Indian name has no rights which he is bound to respect; and it arises in part from the white man’s ignorance. This ignorance is shown partly in the lack of training of our ears in hearing, so that we frequently are unable to distinguish between allied letters, or sounds, such as “p” and “b,” or “m,” for the consonants, or between a simple vowel sound, or a compound, or diphthong. Moreover, our English language is almost hopelessly mixed up between the open, or broad continental pronunciation of the vowels, and the narrow, or closed sound; so that no one is sure that an “a” stands for “ay,” as in “day,” or for “ah,” as in “hurrah.” The Yankee peculiarity, also, of leaving off the sound of “r” where it belongs, and putting it on where it does not belong, like saying “wo’k” for “work,” or “Mariar” for “Mariah,” has very materially changed the original pronunciation. With us, too, the pronunciation of the vowels follows a fashion, and varies from time to time according to what particular “phobia” or “mania” we may happen to be cultivating. At present the prevailing Anglomania is probably affecting our speech as well as our fashions and politics. An Indian name, therefore, that might have been rendered into very good English fifty years ago, may now, having become subject to the mutations of our fads of pronunciation, be spoken quite differently from the original tongue.
But, after making all these allowances, due to our white man’s egotism, ignorance and change of fashions, the main difficulty is in the strangeness, and, it might be said, the rudimentariness of the Indian sounds. Many, perhaps the most, of the aboriginal tones have no exact phonetic equivalent in English. We must remember that their names were originated away back in their own history, and were not affected by contact with Europeans, and have therefore a primitive quality not found even in the Jargon. This makes them more difficult, but certainly not less interesting.
In general it will be found, I think, that the aboriginal languages have the following peculiarities of pronunciation:
1. Almost all the sounds are pronounced farther back in the throat than we pronounce them. This brings into use an almost entirely different set of tones, or more exactly, it brings the various vocal sounds produced by the vocal chords to a point at a different, and to us an unused position of the throat or mouth—at a point where we can scarcely catch and arrest the sound. This makes the vowel sounds in general pectoral or ventral, and the consonant sounds guttural or palatal. As to the consonants, also, it often gives them a clucking or rasping sound not found in our language, unless in certain exclamations.
2. As a consequence of the above, the vowel sounds are not very fully distinguished from the subvowels. There is no “r” sound; if that is ever seen in an Indian name it has been interpolated there by some white mal-transliterator. “L” easily runs into “a,” and “m” into “b.” Names that upon first pronunciation seem to have an “l” turn out upon clearer sound to have a short Italian “a,” or those having an “m” to be more exactly represented by “b.” Probably the fact as to “r” is that it is identical in the aboriginal throat with long Italian “a,” or the ah sound, as it still is with Easterners and Southerners.