The Beginnings of Algonquian Lexicography

Abstract

M s Host of languages encountered by early settlers and explorers of North America belong to Algonquian family. With exception of Iroquois of Upper St. Lawrence and Siouan-speaking groups of Carolinas, Atlantic seaboard was occupied by Algonquian tribes whose names have survived in popular mythology, such as Powhatans of Virginia, and in novels of James Fenimore Cooper, such as Delawares and (heavily fictionalized) Mohegans. From there-across three centuries and better part of a continent-the Algonquian domain stretches to Blackfoot and Cheyenne of northern Great Plains and buffalo-hunting scenes of a Catlin or Bodmer.1 In Canada, most widely spoken languages, then and now, are those of Cree and Ojibwa complexes, with names such as Saulteaux, Algonquin and Ottawa for subdivisions of latter and Montagnais, Swampy Cree and Plains Cree for former. The earliest records of Algonquian languages date from beginning of seventeenth century: writings of Marc Lescarbot (Paris 1609) in New France, of John Smith (Oxford 1612) and William Strachey in Virginia, and then annual reports of Jesuits which began to be published with Paul LeJeune's Relation for 1633. Strachey's material, collected in 1610 and 1611, is the earliest recording in quantity (that has survived) on any Algonquian language (Siebert 1975: 292); although it was not published until modern times, it is typical of seventeenth century in that it is an appendix to a geographical and

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 20 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.