Made In America - Bill Bryson [17]
The early colonists began borrowing words from the Indians almost from the moment of first contact. Moose and papoose were taken into English as early as 1603. Raccoon is first recorded in 1608, caribou and opossum in 1610, moccasin and tomahawk in 1612, hickory in 1618, powwow in 1624, wigwam in 1628.14 Altogether, the Indians provided some 150 terms to the early colonists. Another 150 came later, often after being filtered through intermediate sources. Toboggan, for instance, entered English by way of Canadian French. Hammock, maize and barbecue reached the continent via Spanish from the Caribbean.
Occasionally Indian terms could be adapted fairly simply. The Algonquian seganku became without too much difficulty skunk. Wuchak settled into English almost inevitably as woodchuck (despite the tongue-twister, no woodchuck ever chucked wood). Wampumpeag became wampum. The use of neck in the northern colonies was clearly influenced by the Algonquian naiack, meaning a point or corner, and from which comes the expression that neck of the woods. Similarly the preponderance of capes in New England is at least partly due to the existence of an Algonquian word, kepan, meaning ‘a closed-up passage’.15
Most Indian terms, however, were not so amenable to simple transliteration. Many had to be brusquely and repeatedly pummelled into shape, like a recalcitrant pillow, before any English speaker could feel comfortable with them. John Smith’s first attempt at transcribing the Algonquian word for a tribal leader came out as cawcawwassoughes. Realizing that this was not remotely satisfactory he modified it to a still somewhat hopeful coucorouse. It took a later generation to simplify it further to the form we know today: caucus.16 Raccoon was no less challenging. Smith tried raugroughcum and rahaugcum in the same volume, then later made it rarowcun, and subsequent chroniclers attempted many other forms – aracoune and rockoon, among them – before finally finding phonetic comfort with rackoone.17 Misickquatash evolved into sacatash and eventually succotash. Askutasquash became isquontersquash and finally squash. Pawcohiccora became pohickery and then hickory.
Tribal names, too, required modification. Cherokee was really Tsalaki. Algonquin emerged from Algoumequins. Irinakhoiw yielded Iroquois. Choctaw was variously rendered as Chaqueta, Shacktau and Choktah before settling into its modern form. Even the seemingly straightforward Mohawk has as many as 142 recorded spellings.*9
Occasionally the colonists gave up. For a time they referred to an edible cactus by its Indian name, metaquesunauk, but eventually abandoned the fight and called it a prickly pear.18. Success depended largely on the phonetic accessibility of the nearest contact tribe. Those who encountered the Ojibwa Indians found their dialect so deeply impenetrable that they couldn’t even agree on the tribe’s name. Some said Ojibwa, others Chippewa. By whatever name, the tribe employed consonant clusters of such a confounding density – mtik, pskikye, kchimkwa, to name but three19 – as to convince the new colonists to leave their tongue in peace.
Often, as might be expected, the colonists misunderstood the Indian terms and misapplied them. To the natives, pawcohiccora signified not the tree but the food made from its nuts. Pakan or paccan was an Algonquian word for any hard-shelled nut. The colonists made it pecan (after toying with such variants as pekaun and pecaun) and with uncharacteristic specificity reserved it for the produce of the tree known to science as the Carya illinoensis.
Despite the difficulties, the first colonists were perennially fascinated by the Indian tongues, partly no doubt because they were exotic, but also because they had a beauty that was irresistible. As William Penn wrote: ‘I know not a language spoken in Europe, that hath words of more sweetness or greatness, in accent or emphasis, than theirs.‘20 And he was right. You have only to list a handful of