Николас Остлер - Empires of the Word - A language History of the World

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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; Arumthe Quunnipicuck; Alum,the Neepmuck. [669]

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 [195]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 àhkik w , 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. [670]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; and there was far less effort to convert them. It was only an exceptional Englishman who endeavoured to reach the natives spiritually, or was concerned to try to build solidarity with them. Two such were the Cambridge graduates Roger Williams (16037-83) and John Eliot (1604-90), who learnt their local language, and published books about it: Williams ‘A Key into the Language of America’, and Eliot ‘The Indian Grammar Begun, or an Essay to bring the Indian Language into Rules, for the help of such as desire to learn the same, for the furtherance of the Gospel among them’. [671]Williams was more a political activist, expelled from Massachusetts for his views, and also acting as negotiator for the Narragansetts during hostilities; his ‘Key’ is full of observations on how the natural behaviour of the natives is often at least as good as that of declared Christians. Eliot was more a missionary. Since 1646 he had preached in Massachusett, and translated the whole Bible into it by 1663. [672]Within thirty years there was a ring of towns round about Boston, inhabited by ‘Praying Indians’. But in the next generation, when the London-based Corporation for Propagating the Gospel suggested printing a new edition, it was effectively resisted by the colonial authorities. A Puritan divine wrote back:

The Indians themselves are Divided in their Desires upon this matter. Though some of their aged men are tenacious enough of Indianisme (which is not at all to be wondred at) Others of them as earnestly wish that their people may be made English as fast as they can. The reasons they assign for it are very weighty ones; and this among the rest, That their Indian Tongue is a very penurious one (though the Words are long enough!) and the great things of our Holy Religion brought unto them in it, unavoidably arrive in Terms that are scarcely more intelligible to them than if they were entirely English. But the English tongue would presently give them a Key to all our Treasures and make them the Masters of another sort of Library than any that ever will be seen in their Barbarous Linguo … [673]

By then, Massachusett speakers would already have been few: their principal tribes had been all but destroyed in ‘King Philip’s War’ (1675-6), the last act of resistance by the Massachusett Indians to white expansion, and the Praying Indians were particularly hard hit, having gained no reward from their loyalty to the whites but a two-year deportation to Deer Island, barren and cold, in Boston harbour.

The Virginia, Massachusetts (and Connecticut) colonies were joined in 1670 by a fourth, the Carolina colony, set up by eight English lords under a charter from King Charles II. It had originally had the exotic purpose to subsist on silk farming, but eventually reconciled itself to cultivation of rice and indigo.

Texas is now ours. Already, before these words are written, her Convention has undoubtedly ratified the acceptance, by her Congress, of our proffered invitation into the Union; … other nations have undertaken to intrude themselves into it, between us and the proper parties to the case, in a spirit of hostile interference against us, for the avowed object of thwarting our policy and hampering our power, limiting our greatness and checking the fulfillment of our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions … It is wholly untrue, and unjust to ourselves, the pretence that the Annexation has been a measure of spoliation, unrightful and unrighteous—military conquest under forms of peace and law—territorial aggrandizement at the expense of justice, and justice due by a double sanctity to the weak. This view of the question is wholly unfounded …

John L. Sullivan, United States Magazine and Democratic Review , vol. 17, July/August 1845

So the English settlers established themselves in farming communities on the eastern coast of North America. The next challenge came less from the indigenous peoples than from fellow Europeans. In the seventeenth century, the English did not have the eastern seaboard to themselves, but had to share it with colonists from France to the north, and Spain in Florida to the south (see map on p. 413). Even the centre was not uncontested, since there were Dutch and even Swedish territories intervening between Britain’s Massachusetts and Virginia plantations. In all these cases, the field was cleared by wars in the mother country’s strategic interests. The Dutch were expelled fairly briskly from Nieuw Nederland (Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware and the southern half of New York State [196]) in 1664, and the French, after a century of wars, from Nouvelle-France (eastern Canada), and Louisiane east of the Mississippi, in 1763. Britain also briefly acquired title to Florida from Spain, in exchange for Havana, which it had captured in 1762; it lost it again after the war of 1812. These were the proceeds of global struggles between the European powers, but nonetheless they opened the territories up to settlement by speakers of English.

The next major event was the war from 1775 to 1783 in which the English-speaking colonies made themselves independent of their home government in London, the ‘American Revolution’ which created the USA. This was highly significant politically, in that it formed an autonomous source of expansion for the English colonies in the continent; henceforth the chief English-speaking power in North America was a state ‘with a built-in empire’, [674]and, as it transpired, a western frontier that constantly receded until it reached the Pacific coastline. The federal form of government that was devised in 1777 turned out to be well suited to this new empire with dynamic borders, as new acquisitions progressed from territorial status to statehood. [197]But it also had immediate linguistic effects outside the USA. Many who could not accept the new dispensation decamped northward to Canada, and so created a significant English-speaking community in Ontario. In the following century, this was to attract one of the main streams of immigration into North America, thereby boosting its English-speaking population quite independently of the USA.