33 i? ' Mr. Pickering on the Orthography of the 



several languages'of the authors^ whose remarks upon the Indiau 

 dialects may fall withiQ his observation (which remarks too are 

 often rendered still further uuinleUigible by being read in a trans- 

 lation) he will be very likely to imagine, that the words of a sin- 

 gle dialect^ as he sees them written by a German, a Frenchman^ 



or an Englishman; belong to languages as widely different as 

 those of his several anthors. When, for example, a mere Eng- 

 lish reader finds the familiar names of the Creaks and the Choc- 

 taws, the Wahash and the Washita, with many others, disguised 

 by the French writers under tlie strange garb of ICriques, and 

 Tchactas, Ouahache and Ouachita, &c. ; and, among the German 

 authors, the letters G, J, T, and Z used to express sounds which 

 we should denote by C, Y, D, and TS, as in the words Ganata 

 fov Canada, Jajpewi for Yapewi, JST'mizi for JV^meetsee, with in- 

 numerable others ; (to say nothing of the totally different sounds 

 from ours usually given by foreign writers to all the vowels of the 

 Roman alphabet; — when a mere English reader, I say, finds the 

 very same words thus variously written, he will at first view sup- 

 pose that they are the names and languages of so many different 

 tribes of Indians.* 



r 



* In acIJition io these national differences of orthography, the Rev. Mr. 

 Heckewelder (in replj to Mr. Du Ponceau's inquiries respecting the orthography 

 of the German writers) mentions a very singular reason for the irregularities ob- 

 servable in their use of the letters c, g, and k : «• Sonaetimes (says he) the letters 

 c and g are used in writing the Delaware language instead of /r, to shew that this 

 consonant is not pronounced too hard ; but, in general^ c and g have been used as 

 substitutes for Jc^ hecause our printers had not a s 

 that c/iaracf er." Correspondence of Heckewelder ana 



state of our country at the present day is such, that this will no longer bean apol- 

 ogy for the irregularity ia question. It may be added, as Mr. Du Ponceau justly 

 remarks in a letter to me, that « a German ear, unless very delicate, does not 

 ordinarily discriminate between k or c hard, and -, between 37 and h, nor betweea 



d and f. To a German only would it have occurred, to substitute g- for Jt." 



tfficient supply of types f 



