ALGONQUIAN LANGUAGES. 



353 



"Meeker (J.) — Continued. 



performance "of public religious exercises, and 

 acquits himself much to the satisfaction of the 

 missionaries.'' 



During the next six years several other books 

 were printed in the Ottawa language. The 

 printing press was afterwards removed from 

 Shawanoe to the Ottawa mission station, where 

 Mr. Meeker again took charge of it, and printed 

 two books in 1850. He died at the mission on 

 the 12tli of January, 1854. 



The "new system of writing and reading," 

 invented by Mr. Meeker, was adopted in all the 

 Indian books printed at the Shawanoe mission 

 press. This system, according to its advocates, 

 ^^ wholly excludes spelling,''' and "enables the 

 learner to paint his thoughts on paper, with 

 precision, as soon as he acquires a knowledge 

 of a number oi chaiacteis about equal to the 

 English alphabet." The following account of 

 it is taken from McCoy's History of Baptist 

 Indian Missions: 



" To each Indian language, and to each dia- 

 lect of language, belong peculiar sounds, which 

 cannot be obtained by the use of the English 

 alphabet. To designate syllables which could 

 not be spelt, or sounds which could not be ob- 

 tained by the ordinary use of letters, writers 

 who would write intelligibly have been com- 

 pelled to introduce arbitrary characters, each 

 according to his fancy. It can easily be con- 

 ceived that serious inconvenience attended 

 this course of things. 



"Mr. Guess, a Cherokee, had discovered that 

 the language of his tribe could be written with 

 about eighty syllabic characters. Guess's plan 

 was tried in relation to some other languages, 

 and found to be inapplicable, because charac- 

 ters would be multiplied beyond the bounds of 

 convenience. 



" To remedy the evils which attended the or- 

 dinary methods of writing Indian, and the com- 

 plexity which would attend the universal ap- 

 plication of Guess's system, the idea suggested 

 itself to Mr. Meeker, then at Sault de St. Marie, 

 of using characters not to designate syllables, 

 but certain positions of the organs of speech. 

 His first writing was rather a combination of 

 this new principle with the syllabic system and 

 the system of spelling. 



" When the press was put into operation at 

 the Shawanoe mission house, the missionaries 

 among the Shawanoes and Delawares took up 

 the new principle of Mr. Meeker, and reduced 

 it to a system, excluding entirely the syllabic 

 or hieroglyphic system, and also that of spell- 

 ing. 



" By spelling, we mean that process by which 

 the learner is required to familiarize the mem- 

 ory with certain names of characters, (letters) 

 and then, after combining these in a certain 

 order, a sound (syllable) must be uttered — 

 not one produced by the combination, but alto- 

 gether arbitrary. This sound, unmeaning in 

 itself, must be born in raiud until, by a similar 

 process, a second, third, or fourth, be obtained ; 

 ALG 23 



Meeker (J.) — Continued. 



and, lastly, these sounds must be combined, in 

 order to form a word. 



"Upon the new system, every uncompounded 

 sound which can be distinguished by the ear 

 is indicated by a character. These sounds, in 

 Indian languages, usually amount to about 

 eight or ten, the greater part of which, but not 

 all, are what in the system of spelling would 

 be denominated vowel sounds ; other sounds 

 are such, for instance, as the hissing sound of 

 the letter s, in which consists its real value, the 

 sound obtained by ch, as in church, &c. The 

 other characters, usually in number about 

 twelve or fourteen, merely indicate the posi- 

 tions of the organs of speech preceding or follow- 

 ing the sounds, by which the beginning or end- 

 ing of sounds is modified ; thus, the character 

 p, would require the lips to be pressed together 

 with a slight pressure within,: this, o, would 

 indicate a sound which could be heard by the 

 ear — say the short sound of o ; this, t, would 

 require the end of the tongue to be pressed 

 hard to the roof of the mouth. Now, if the 

 sound of intervenes between the pressure of 

 the lips and the pressure of the tongue, as above 

 indicated, the word pot is necessarily pronounc- 

 ed; transpose the characters, and adhere to the 

 same rule, and the word top is unavoidably 

 pronounced. 



"Hence, as soon as the learner acquires a 

 knowledge of the uses of the characters, more 

 than twenty-three of which have not yet been 

 found necessary in writing any Indian language, 

 he is capable of reading ; because, by placing 

 the organs of speech, or uttering a sound, as is 

 indicated by each character as it occurs, he is 

 actually reading.''' 



The new system, however, did not me,et with 

 much favor from others. "Pretty soon after 

 we had issued a few prints upon the new sys- 

 tem, from the press at the Shawanoe mission 

 house, two influential Presbyterian missiona- 

 ries from among the Choctaws visited us. 

 They had published a few books in the Choctaw 

 language, written upon the principles of or- 

 thography. Peculiar sounds could not be ob- 

 tained by the use of the English, or any other 

 alphabet, and to remedy this evil they had in- 

 vented new characters, and procured new types 

 to print them. The superiority of our cheap, 

 and expeditious, and correct system, over their 

 worse than old-fashioned plan, was so obvious 

 to us, that we hoped for their ready and hearty 

 co-operation in introducing it into common use 

 in the Indian country. In this we were griev- 

 ously disappointed ; and, to add to our mortifi- 

 cation, they zealously urged us to reject our 

 system, as futile. No reason, however, was of- 

 fered, only that they had written a little in 

 Choctaw, and all our prints ought to be uniform. 

 They seemed to overlook the fact that the Cher- 

 okees by their side wrote by syllabic hiero- 

 glyphics, and that we could not, even with the 

 use of the new characters introduced by them 

 in order to obtain peculiar sounds in Choctaw, 



