Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [268]
The task facing the English colonists was quite comparable to the challenge to Cortés and the Spaniards who had invaded Mexico just a century before, to establish themselves, as masters, in the midst of someone else’s country. But English motives for being in America were rather different. They were not looking for gold, converts or even dominion. Rather, they were looking for land. This prospect had been the chief inducement for volunteers, ever since Humphrey Gilbert’s prospectus for the first failed expedition of 1583. For Englishmen, the intent to create a ‘New England’ was quite literal, and many showed their earnest by bringing wives and small children out with them.
Since they had no interest in the inhabitants, except as untrusted and expendable helpmeets, it was of little concern to them that there was no major overlord fit for conquest in the part of America into which they had projected themselves, nor that—as it happened—the language spoken by the first inhabitants they met was actually very widespread there and far beyond: they were more struck by the fact that the language as they encountered it was highly riven dialectally, which meant that even those few who made the effort to learn to speak it could scarcely be understood when they wandered farther afield:
I once travelled to an island of the wildest in our parts … I was alone having travelled from my bark, the wind being contrary; and little could I speak to them to their understanding, especially because of the change of their dialect and manner of speech; yet much, through the help of God, did I speak … that at my parting, many burst forth, ‘Oh, when will you come again, to bring us some more news of this God?’
…
Anum; a dog … the variety of their dialects and proper speech, within thirty or forty miles of each other, is very great, as appears in that word: Anum, the Cowweset dialect; Ayim, the Narroganset; Arum the Quunnipicuck; Alum, the Neepmuck.21
Unknown to anyone at the time, members of the linguistic family in fact extended in two almost unbroken strips for 2500 kilometres, across the central and northern reaches of the continent as far as the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, from Powhatan to Shawnee to Miami to Illinois to Arapaho to Cheyenne, and from Massachusett to Abenaki to Algonquin† to Ojibwa to Menominee to Cree to Blackfoot. In between Powhatan and Massachusett lay speakers of another related language, Lenape. These languages were very different from English, highly polysyllabic in their words, and with profusions of prefixes and suffixes. But they were fairly similar to each other, as a few animal names show: ‘moose’ is Abenaki mos, Miami moswa, Ojibwa mōns, Menominee mōs; ‘seal’ is Abenaki àhkikw, Ojibwa āskik, Cree āhkik; ‘bison’ is Abenaki pēsihkó or wēihko, Menominee pesοPhkiw, Ojibwa pišikki, Cree pisihkiw; and ‘bobwhite’, a species of small bird (Colinus virginianus), is Lenape pōhpōhkēs, and Miami pohposisia. In the Massachusett translation of the Bible, the word for ‘quails’ is poohpoohqu-tteh.22 It is revealing that only in one of these four examples was the Indian word actually borrowed into English: the settlers had never seen a pēsihkó before, but they still preferred to stick with their own linguistic world, and name it for something similar that they did know.
The settlers’ attitude to the Indians was to attempt to coexist peacefully until they needed to dispossess them to provide more land for their expanding community. There was little or no cohabitation, but hostilities followed sooner or later; and the natives of New England in the end died out far more thoroughly and rapidly than those of Mexico or Peru. Nevertheless, the English never undertook to subjugate the whole country militarily, as the Spanish did immediately in any new territory that they explored. As a result, the British authorities never felt responsible for the Indians in the way that the Spanish did;