A Key Into The Language Of America

A discourse on the languages of Native Americans encountered by the early settlers. This early linguistic treatise gives rare insight into the early contact between Europeans and Native Americans.

A discourse on the languages of Native Americans encountered by the early settlers written by Roger Williams, who was forced to leave Massachusetts and established Rhode Island. This early linguistic treatise gives rare insight into the early contact between Europeans and Native Americans.

A white woman's recreation of the sound and spirit of Indian poetry. A sampler: "eagle / turkey / partridge / cormorant / Ptowewushannick. / They are fled."

A Key into the Language of America, also known as An help to the Language of the Natives in that part of America called New England, is a detailed colonial study of the native languages and dialects of the Native American tribes in New England in the 17th century. It mainly focused on the Algonquian and the Narragansett languages. This book is widely believed to be responsible for making American Indian languages more accessible and introducing some words into the English language.

When Columbus arrived in the Americas there were, it is believed, as many as 2,000 distinct, mutually unintelligible tongues spoken in the western hemisphere, encompassing the entire area from the Arctic Circle to Tierra del Fuego. This astonishing fact has generally escaped the attention of historians, in part because many of these indigenous languages have since become extinct. And yet the burden of overcoming America's language barriers was perhaps the one problem faced by all peoples of the New World in the early modern era: African slaves and Native Americans in the Lower Mississippi Valley; Jesuit missionaries and Huron-speaking peoples in New France; Spanish conquistadors and the Aztec rulers. All of these groups confronted America's complex linguistic environment, and all of them had to devise ways of transcending that environment - a problem that arose often with life or death implications. For the first time, historians, anthropologists, literature specialists, and linguists have come together to reflect, in the fifteen original essays presented in this volume, on the various modes of contact and communication that took place between the Europeans and the "Natives." A particularly important aspect of this fascinating collection is the way it demonstrates the interactive nature of the encounter and how Native peoples found ways to shape and adapt imported systems of spoken and written communication to their own spiritual and material needs.