Pequot From Stiles to Speck thanks to Cowan

Pure Pequot, as Speck calls it, seems to be a little difficult to find directly. The farther back you go the more you find people who knew their material but mostly used Pequot as a comparison to other languages to talk about that language. Then when they were gone, the knowledge was lost with them. I wish they’d simply put out their personal Pequot dictionaries and grammar books for us, because we need them!

In 1973 William Cowan gathered together words in Speck’s work and compared them to a Pequot list from 1762 by Ezra Stiles. According to Cowan, Stiles had gotten these words from a Pequot tribal member in Gronton, Connecticut. It was a bit of a dive for me to find the article, and even though it’s Sunday (as of beginning this post) and I wanted to take the day off for other things I found myself reading his work. It’s nice. It’s helpful. It needs organization.

I guess I’ll go get the figurative broom for my own efforts. Speck’s information was organized in lines with: 1. the Pequot form 2. the “English gloss”, 3. the page number in Trumbull’s Natick Dictionary where the form appears when and if it was referenced for comparison, 4. the form in Prince and Speck’s material if found, 5. the Proto-Algonquian reconstructed form if found (at the time) and 6. Aubin and Lee’s list number for the PA form, also if found at the time.

The following table is the information he presented as he’d intended for it to be understood (I hope). I underlined at least one time I saw where the word had a possessor or similar prefix or suffix on it. When I’m finished building it, I’ll see what we have.

• Towaunnemaudno wandgunum n’teump (228) neegau nuckheguut (221); Moh-che mussÿums mochin teautum eyew teatum gynchums. – I wish I had my bows and arrows; I think I would shoot you.
• Wuttúggio Eyéwkéezuk Weenugh: wet today very. (343) w’tůgāyō (wet); yû gîsk (today). PA: *ki :šekwi (636)
• Ni ooush oppoouhyewwheh, taubut yewmunnashwah wauweegckocheu.: My Father I am glad to see you above the highest seat.
• chauh poos zaunchuum; mouhghchee wauweegosunchkeetewwauwe: of the sachem or king
• ockheege, oppouh jewweh: ashmeezum e-yéwgeghueegkun pawtúckkonneage: on Earth above give this day bread
• cowunggunsh ahqua yumba piaushquadtta; (eyewqkeezuc) mooghehee: Pray do forgive us or be angry with us no more too day beseach
• coweeüngumpsh auhque: pray keep me from snares

It took about two days to put this chart together, so as I finished it Monday had arrived. One thing I’d noticed painfully about all this is that I really need some sort of plugin or app that will let me type more than the pathetic few phonetic characters Windows sees fit to allow us. A search for an answer didn’t come up with one – not even more new programs. I’m running Word 2007 with no intention of upgrading, same with my OS… soooo… ooo …. o.

Anyhoo. Already I’ve noticed some things, such as the differences Modern Mohegan has from the 18th century-1700’s form. If there was a doubt that Mohegan was forming into something new away from Pequot, I don’t have it anymore. Not that I had to begin with. My first question isn’t about the words; it’s the grammar. Did it stay the same?

And specie names! I’m thrilled. I’ve always had a scant list of animals to work with. Only one kind of duck? Only one kind of fish? “Not on MY watch!” says Stiles. And with so many water based life forms in the list ending with -aug, I don’t think I’ll be able to look at a sausage the same again.

Wikipedia isn’t the best as a sole resource, but it is good for finding where to go for source material so I’m also looking at a page about this very material in which whomever put it together also took time to look at Sitles’s list. They checked against the online scan, which I’ll probably be doing word by word as I come to it.

One thing I noticed, partly because I went to the store with a friend and our conversation brought up a word that made me think, is that the use of the “soft stops” represented by ‘. Sometimes they appear to have been represented with an elongated u sound, stress on a syllable, or an h. They have all but been taken out of the Modern Mohegan I was given. They also don’t seem to be represented in the Pequot information I’ve been given. But they were there and they might still belong.

Maybe some of it is simply we’re having to bring this language into a predominately English-speaking population, or maybe there’s another reason. I would have difficulty thinking that Julian Granberry, who had worked with the Mohegan tribe for so long, would have had random reasons why he made the decisions he did. Of course, he had also presented a larger alphabet with something similar in it. So it’s anyone’s guess why.

But if part of it is because we just don’t appear to have that sound in our modern American English (extremely doubtful), I can give you at least three examples immediately that may not be perfect but they’re close.

1. The h- in ah-ha. Say the word, and you’ll notice how the word gets broken into two separate sounds with a silence in the middle made by the back of your throat slicing the word in half. It’s just cut off by the stop, so that it’s very faint.
2. Uh-oh is another word that stops a little like ah-ha. I’ve loved this word ever since my linguistics course in college, because I now know it’s a rare (in American English) full glottal stop.¹ Uh-oh is fun. It’s a little different than another glottal stop where the tt are silenced as you say the word “kitten”. There’s also Hawai’i, but I suspect that doesn’t count because it’s a loan word.
3. The way many people that are not me pronounce “herbivore”, “herbalism” and “herb”, etc. My h isn’t completely dropped so much as so silent you’d think it wasn’t there. This is how my family said the word, the few times I got to hear it from them (Which wasn’t much.) But when around my husband, friends, and other people the h is slightly more pronounced. It’s very soft. They’re not saying the name “Herb” where the h is forced out. (Well, okay, my husband does. LOL) It’s subtle. It’s enough of a difference I’ve corrected them, which a lifetime later I wonder at the difference in our dialects so close to one another. Maybe where my family comes from is the key.

When trying to use either of those sounds while speaking some of the words aloud, the semi-glottal stop comes more naturally. I don’t know if there’s anything to this, as I said. It’s just something I’ve noticed, and at this stage I’m probably 100% wrong.

I’m not finished reading Cowen’s article yet so I go back to it. Which means if I have further thoughts on it, I’ll have to dedicate that to another post. I’m sure there will come a day when I’m versed enough to simply talk about things I’ve noticed without pouring through an article, but that’s not today. I’m just gonna schedule this post now, m’kay, and step outside a while.

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• Cowan, William. “Pequot from Stiles to Speck.” International Journal of American Linguistics, vol. 39, no. 3, 1973, pp. 164–72. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1264567. Accessed 20 May 2024.

• https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:A_vocabulary_of_the_Pequot_Indians

1. Which isn’t the same as a t-glottal stop I was taught, where the stop takes the place of the t. Don’t argue with me about. Talk to my college teacher. I’m aware theories have changed, but uh-oh will ALWAYS be cool to me. ↩︎