100 DANIEL WILSON ON THE HUEON-IEOQUOIS OP 



may be doubted if many of their couverts bad ever seen a sbeep. But they had to reproduce 

 in Mohawk this general confession : " We have ciTed and strayed from Thy ways like lost 

 sheep." They did it accordingly in this fashion : Teyagwaderijeadawearyesneoni yoegicatha- 

 haragwaglUha tsisahate tsiniyouhl yodii/adaghtoeouh teyodinakaroetoeha, which may be literally 

 rendered: " We make a mistake, and get off the track where your road is, the same as 

 strayed animals with small horns." The extreme literaluess of the rendering may pro- 

 bably strike the mind of the English reader in a way that would not occur to the Indian, 

 familiar with such descriptive holophrasms. But it illustrates a difficulty with which 

 Eliot was very familiar when engaged on his Massachusetts Indian Bible. In translating, 

 for exam])le, the song of Deborah and Barak, where the mother of Sisera " cried through 

 the lattice," the good missionary looked in A^ain in the Indian wigwam for anything that 

 corresponded to the term. At length he called an Indian and described to him a lattice 

 as wicker work, and obtained in response a rendering of the text which literally meant : 

 " The mother of Sisera looked through an eel-pot." It was the only kind of wicker-work 

 of which the Indian had any knowledge. But such difficulties are trifling compared with 

 the ideas involved in theological phraseology, such as necessarily occvir in the Creeds, 

 the Te Deum, or the Litany. For example, the sentence : " When thou tookest upon thee 

 to deliver man," as rendered in the Litany, has the word " deliver " reproduced in Mohawk 

 by aoesaghsheyadiikoh, which is formed of ahoimsasko, "to get," or "bring," and ohyrida, 

 " a body." As to the Mohawk equivalent for " womb," in the same sentence, kanegweudakonh, 

 it need not stirprise us to find that its literal significance is " in the belly." The word, 

 " responses," which in its peculiar liturgical significance was not to be looked for in the 

 Mohawk vocabulary, is rendered tehadiiighicawearonhs, or literally, " first one and then the 

 other." ' The name for "heaven" is borrowed from the visible blue sky ; oro/tya, "blue," 

 — in the Hviron, aronhiu ; karonhyakonh, " in the blue," i.e., heaven ; though in speaking of 

 heaven it is more usual to say hironyakeh, " on the blue ; " so also karonyakerononh, " being 

 of the blue," or " of heaA^en," i.e., heavenly. 



The examples of different Huron-Iroquois Aversions of the Lord's Prayer here produced 

 will help to ilhistrate the character of some of the leading forms of its dialects. But the 

 remark with which Mr. Hale, in the introduction to "The Iroquois Book of Rites," 

 concludes his instructive analysis of the formation of the Iroquois language, is worthy 

 of special note. After indicating the marA'ellous preserA^ation of grammatical forms, not 

 less elaborate than those of Sanskrit or Greek, among unlettered tribes, he adds : " What 

 is still more remarkable, a comparison of the Iroquois with the Huron grammar, shows 

 that, after a separation Avhich must have exceeded fiA^e hundred years, and has probably 

 exceeded twice that term, the two languages differ less from one another than the French 

 of the tAvelfth century differed from the Italian, or than the Anglo-Saxon of King Alfred 

 differed from the contemporary low G-erman speech." '' 



The first of the following Aversions of the Lord's Prayer is of special interest as a 

 specimen of the Huron language in a translation executed within twenty-fiA^e years after 

 the destruction of the Huron settlements on the Georgian Bay. The copy which I possess 



' When crossing the ocean in the S. S. Sardinian, I was amused to liear the late Captain Dutton direct 

 his seamen, when assembled for religious service, to smg port and starboard, — a sailor's rendering of antiphonal. 

 '•' The Iroquois Book of Rites, p, 113. 



