And now, dear soul! good-night once more;
God keep thee with his shelt'ring might!
What God keeps, that is well watch'd o'er,
And kept from danger and affright.
Adieu!—now close the sunny shine
Of those blue laughing eyes of thine!
[MOHEGAN LANGUAGE AND GEOGRAPHICAL NAMES.]
To the Editors of the Knickerbocker:
Michilimackinack, August 2, 1837.
In making some inquiries recently of a party of the Mohegan tribe—the remnant of whom have made their way to this quarter within a few years—I find that they have preserved their traditionary history for the last two centuries, or more, with a degree of accuracy which is not common to the native tribes in this region. It is very well known, from published data, that this ancient tribe occupied Long-Island and the contiguous main land, on the discovery of the country, whence in process of time they withdrew eastwardly into Connecticut, and afterward went west into Massachusetts. They appear, from the first, to have had the means of instruction, which have been continued up to the present time, with perhaps less interruption than among most of the other tribes. This may account in part for the better preservation of their traditions. Many of them being able to read, could refer to some things in printed documents. Others appear to have retained with tenacity that traditionary lore which the aged among the tribes generally employ the leisure of their superannuated days in handing down to the young.
During the long residence of this tribe at Stockbridge, (Mass.,) they were commonly Stockbridges, and after the revolutionary war, when they transferred their residence to Oneida, in western New-York, they naturally retained this name, and finally bore it with them to their present location in Wisconsin territory. I disclaim any intention to sketch their history; and wish no farther to allude to it, than appears to be necessary to bring forward a few facts in the character of their language, and particularly their names for the places of their former residence, on the lower parts of the Hudson. And as this is a matter of which but little is generally known, it has appeared to me of sufficient local interest, to justify the liberty I take in addressing these remarks to you.
The Mohegan is readily recognised as a type of the Algonquin or (as Mr. Gallatin has recently denominated it,) the 'Lenapee-Algonkin' family, and bears a strong resemblance, both in sound and syntax, to the dialects of some of the existing lake tribes. This affinity is very striking in its grammatical structure, and its primitive words. Derivatives, with all our tribes, are subject to interchange their consonants, or drop them entirely, which creates a necessity of being constantly on the alert to detect these exchanges. Moreover, the accent is uniformly moved, or doubled, often creating primary and secondary accents in the same phrase, which, in an unwritten language, is alone sufficient to account for numerous mutations. But what, more than any other principle, affects the sound of Indian words, in their concrete and derivative states, is the large stock of (so to say) floating particles, which come into these words in the shape of prefixes and suffixes. These are, in their offices, almost as numerous as the purposes of person, tense, number, quality, position, etc., may require. But while their respective office remains precisely the same, in almost any given number of dialects in a mother language, it is found that the several tribes pique themselves in giving these auxiliary particles a sound peculiar to themselves, by which something like nationality is kept up. Thus in two dialects indicating the least change in the primitives or derivatives, to be found among all the tribes, namely, the Chippewa and Ottowa, these particles, which, in the animate class for plural, are denoted by UG, and in the local inflections by ONG, and ING, in the one dialect, are respectively changed to UK, ONK, and INK, in the other.
Similar to this process, seems to have been the result of change between the ancient Algonquin and the Mohegan, the latter, like the Ottowa, constantly substituting K for G, and P for B, etc., but in other respects, it exhibits numerous gutturals, and some aspirates, which are but rarely found in the liquid flow of the Algic. It also embraces the (perhaps) Gothic sound of TH, which is wholly unknown (the Shawnee excepted) to the modern lake dialects.