AMERICAN ABORIGINAL NAMES. 81 



NORTH AND SOUTH AMERICAN ABORIGINAL NAMES. 



By M. V. MOORE. 



THERE are numerous evidences showing that the same abo- 

 riginal peoples who named the waters of North America 

 coined also the prehistoric geographical titles in South America. 

 Scores of actual identities are revealed in the prehistoric nomen- 

 clatures of the two portions of this continent. These identities 

 are not only in various terms that appear in the river names 

 which still survive and betray the tongue of indeterminate ages 

 here, but the very same ancient words in full are apparently re- 

 produced in many instances. The reproductions are indeed of 

 such a character as to induce the belief that the earliest civ- 

 ilization of both North and South America had origin in one 

 common ancestry. The oldest nomenclature surviving in the 

 countries both North and South certainly indicates origin in 

 civilization. 



We have now no definite knowledge as to how some of the old 

 aboriginal names should be properly written in our English 

 idiom. There are slightly different versions or expressions of the 

 ancient words which have been perpetuated in the idioms of the 

 French, Spanish, and Portuguese words that are evidently the 

 same thing in remotest origin and structure. From the very be- 

 ginning of the modern European conquest and colonization, the 

 " Indian " names have been invested chiefly with what is purely a 

 fanciful and conjectural orthography in their English writings. 

 There has been no surviving testimonial, in either living or dead 

 tongues, fixing the definite expression of the ancient words just 

 as the native man would have written them had he been possessed 

 of the proper facilities. 



Sometimes the old native names have been made to appear un- 

 necessarily grotesque in their writing in some instances as much 

 so as the rude savage himself appears personally the fact illus- 

 trated in the writing Youghiogheney for simply Ya-og-ha-na, and 

 in Esquemeaux for Es-ka-mo. Many purely poetic garbs of the 

 old words have become incorporated into our permanent geo- 

 graphical literature. The names Mississippi and Tennessee are 

 examples of the fanciful versions of the old aboriginal titles : the 

 former is supposed to have been in sounds represented by the 

 English writing Mes-sis-a-pa, while the oldest historic records 

 extant showing the latter give the writing as Ten-as-sa. What is 

 evidently one ancestral word appears in the modern versions of 

 Shetuanee, Seivanee, Suivanee, Swanan, and Chowan. The French 

 writing Cheyenne is the same word in the remote ancestry, as is 

 now believed. 



VOL. XLIV. 7 



