X BTTREAU OF AMERICAN ETH]Sr(.)LO«Y [bill. 25 



Mifssionaiy Society tirst undertook its translations of the Bible, it 

 adopti'd. after some question, the vowel pronunciation of the Latin 

 nations. The wadtchu (mountain) of Eliot becomes in Mr. Sherman 

 Hall's translation uijiuii, the one letter >i being the onl_y letter which 

 is the .same in both words; 3'et both mean to express the same sound. 

 It seems now a great pity that the translators in our century did not 

 use in any way the diligent work of Eliot. 



In the spring of 1S99 I 2)laced before a Chippewa boy in the Hamp- 

 ton (Virginia) school thirty words of the Massachusetts Indian lan- 

 guage. He recognized at once fifteen of them, giving to them their 

 full meaning; and with a little study he made out almost all of the 

 remainder. In the course of two and a half centuries the uses of 

 words ditfer as much among Indians as among white men, but it 

 would seem that they do not differ more. 



Such careful study as Dr Trumbull and Duponceau and Pickering 

 and Heckewelder have given to the Algonquian languages shows 

 be_yond a doubt that John Eliot was one of the great philologists of 

 the world. His study of the remarkable grammatic construction of the 

 Indian languages proves to be scientitic and correct. The linguists 

 of the continent of Eurojie took it for granted, almost, that Eliot's 

 statements regarding the grammar of the Indian tribes could not 

 be true. It seemed to them impossible that languages so perfect in 

 their systems and so cai-efully precise in their adaptations of tho.se 

 .systems could maintain their integrity among tribes of savages who 

 had no system of writing. All study of these languages, however, 

 through the century which has just passed, has proved that the elab- 

 orate system of grammar was correctly described by Eliot, and, to the 

 surprise of European philologists, that it is fairly uniform through 

 many variations of dialect and vocabulary. 



It is much to be regretted that a careless haliit of thougiit takes it 

 for granted tliat a good Indian word of one locality is a good Indian 

 word of another, and that names may lie transferred from North to 

 South or from South to North at the free will of an innkeeper or of a 

 poet. Such transfers of words, which in the beginning amount almost 

 to falsehood, cause more confusion and more as time goes by. 



Mr Filling's valuable bibliography of the Algonquian languages 

 shows us that there are now existing fourteen complete copies of 

 Eliot's Bible in the first and second editions. Besides the complete 

 text we have the New Testament printed in a separate volume in 1061, 

 and in the Eliot Primer or Catechism, which has been reprinted in the 

 present generation, we have the Lord's Prayer and some texts from 

 the Bible, as well as a translation of the Apostles' Creed into the 

 Massachusetts language. The number of books printed as part of his 

 movement for the translation of the Scriptures and the conversion of 

 the Indians is nearlv fortv. For the use of all these books Dr Trum- 



