Another good resource, if dated.
I have some takeaways from it. In order:
“When I was but six years of age, my father removed with his family to Stockbridge” – I found this fortuitous, as I’d begun this article thinking perhaps the author had either learned the language late or it was going to be from a time before the tribes had come to Stockbridge, where the languages had finally found a home and begun to find their way into the Brotherton’s vernacular.
“Out of my father’s house, I seldom heard any language spoken, beside the Indian.” – Sigh. Lucky guy.
“Mohegans, which is a corruption of Muhhekaneew” *” – Thus we start with some confusion on my part, and I know this is part of the source for confusion in general with many people. Mohican is not Mohegan, well except in the case of people like myself who share both lineages. LOL. But seriously, the Muhhekaneew were not the Mohegan. Two different tribes. Although I have to acknowledge that in Stockbridge the Brotherton, a tribe founded by my Mohegan ancestor with many Mohegan members along with members of other tribes — had also come to live in Stockbridge. However, he’s discussing the Mohican language here. Later in the paragraph he is sure to mention the Munsee people, who joined with the Muhhekaneew to become the Stockbridge-Munsee of today — as a separate people as well.
“Wherever w occurs in an Indian word, it is a mere consonant, as a world” – Oh boy! Pronunciation lessons.
“gh in any Indian word has the strong guttural found, which is given by the Scots to the same letters in the words tough, enough*” – Here I am reminded of a thought I’d had a while ago, and this reinforced my line of thinking with it. You see, in the 1600’s and even during the age that this article was written people spoke differently than today. Which means to assume that by ‘tough’ he means it to be pronounced, “tuff” might not be the wisest thing. How then was the Scottish accent in 1788, when this was written?
I know that Muhhekaneew was preserved later as speakers survived past this time (and I’m actually supposed to be concentrating on Munsee ha ha), and that the sounds will already have been recorded and set by linguists but I went on an internet search anyway. I found this website: https://www.scotslanguage.com/.
And I emailed them my question. Because you never know.
Concerning the Mohegan language,, it is observable, that that there is no diversity of gender, either ‘in nouns or pronouns”.”- Now this I already knew. There is no real he, she, or it with the Algonquian language families. Instead: do you be dead or alive? What I mean is, the ‘gender’ is divided between animate and inanimate.
Some things are considered alive, and some things are not. Between the two, words will take different forms to indicate that. I kind of like how https://munseedelaware.com/ puts it:
Huluniixsuwáakan speakers think of nouns in terms of ‘he/she’ for animates and in terms of ‘it’ for inanimates.
Plurals (more than one of a noun) form differently for each gender. The plural animate ‘they’ could be thought of as: ‘more than one he or she’
“They have no relative corresponding to our who or which. Instead of the man who walks. They say, the walking man, or the walker.” – I really appreciate this statement, because it can be difficult to wrap your head around why every single word in the Algonquian languages appears to need their own forms according to who is doing what in a sentence.
This boils down to part of my philosophy in approaching saving our tongues. It’s a matter of a different way of thought. In “the man who walks”, the man is separated from the action despite the fact that he is doing that action. But in Algonquian, “the walking man, or the walker” is describing that man in the moment. He is a man, he is walking, the action is part of him, and he is the walker. It’s incredibly descriptive allowing the man to own the action. This man is more than just a man who walks or is walking. He *is* the action.
There’s more of course, but I’m not here to spoon feed the entire article. I am pleased of course to have gains some evidence to back up some of the things I’ve been considering, even if this article is more about the Mohican language than Munsee. Mohican was not saved and is still considered “sleeping” although efforts are being made to get it awake. Even so, the information still pertains to my other focuses.