Read American Language Supplement 2 Online
Authors: H.L. Mencken
American Language Supplement 2 (111 page)
7
Newsweek
, Jan. 15, 1940.
1
I am indebted here to Mr. J. H. Young, of the Association headquarters in New York.
2
June 1, 1935, p. 21.
3
I am indebted here to Mr. William Saroyan, the Armenian-American dramatist and story-writer, and to Mr. Richard Badlian, of Boston.
4
All these Arabic names are from Arabic-Speaking Americans, by H. I. Katibah and Farhat Ziadeh: New York, 1946. In The Arab Village Community of the Middle East, in the Annual Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution for 1943; Washington, 1944, p. 537, Afif I. Tannous says that “when the first boy is born to a married couple people cease to call them by their name. Instead they are called after the name of their son – for example,
Abu-Ahmed
and
Um-Ahmed, i.e.
, the father and mother of
Ahmed
.” This practise, of course, is abandoned in America.
1
More examples are in AL4, p. 510.
2
Parade
, April 14, 1946, p. 18.
3
13 Fines Assessed on Trash Counts, Baltimore
Evening Sun
, Jan. 4, 1946, p. 29.
4
Chinese in the United States Today, by Rose Hum Lee,
Survey Graphic
, Oct., 1942, p. 419. For more, see AL4, p. 513. On Feb. 18, 1946
Donaldine Lew
, a Chinese soprano, sang at the Hotel Ambassador in New York.
1
A Japanese View of Rotary, by S. Sheba,
Rotarian
, March 1937, p. 5.
2
Additional Notes on Personal Names in Hawaii, by John E. Reinecke,
American Speech
, Feb., 1943, pp. 69–70. See also English Hawaiian Words, by O. Shaw; Milwaukee, 1938, pp. 71–80.
The need of a comprehensive treatise on American place-names, sufficiently well-informed to content specialists in the subject and yet written with enough sense of the picturesque to please the general reader, was met in 1945 by the appearance of Dr. George R. Stewart’s “Names on the Land.” It begins with a discussion of the lovely but somewhat repetitive names that the early Spaniards bestowed
upon the coasts and rivers of their discovery, and proceeds to the banal and unimaginative town names of the New England Puritans, to those borrowed from the French, Dutch, and later immigrants, to those carried westward by the first flights of pioneers, and to those issuing from the exuberant fancy of the same.
1
It does not linger long over Indian names, though they are always the first to attract the attention of a foreigner glancing at a map of the United States, but this perhaps is not illogical, for Indian place-names were in a state of chaos among the Indians themselves, and to this day the meaning of large numbers of them is in dispute or quite unintelligible.
Consider, for example, one of the most familiar:
Allegheny
. “The name,” says a leading authority on Pennsylvania names, “has been a battleground for the Indian etymologists; no less than six different explanations are current.”
2
More, there is no general agreement as to the spelling. The United States Geographic Board, in its heyday, made an effort to win universal acceptance for
Allegeny
, but in vain, and the two variants,
Allegany
and
Alleghany
, still survive and flourish.
3
Two other examples are
Penobscot
and
Milwaukee
. The meaning of the former has been debated for years, but with no result save the agreement that it somehow relates to water falling over rocks.
4
The latter is said by some authorities to be derived from an Indian word,
milioke
or
miloaki
, meaning good earth, and by others from
mahnah-wauk-seepe
, meaning a council ground near a river; yet others favor
man-a-waukee
, meaning a place where the Indians harvested a medicinal root called
man-wau
. A French map of 1648 made it
Meleke;
Father Louis Hennepin, the Franciscan missionary and explorer, spelled it
Melleoke
in 1679, and John Baisson de St. Cosme used
Milwarick
in 1699. The first postoffice established on the site of the present city was called
Melwakee
, but that was soon changed to
Milwaukie
, which continues to this day to be the name of a town in Oregon. Other forms in the past have been
Millicki, Melwarik, Milwacky
and
Milwackey
.
5
Great confusion prevails especially among the Indian names of
the Eastern seaboard, for at the time they were adopted but little was known about the Indian languages, and since the study thereof has been tackled by competent linguists, the number of persons speaking them has greatly diminished, and in many cases fallen to zero. Moreover, those that survive have apparently changed considerably since the early days, and knowledge of most of them is still too scanty to give a sure footing to so difficult a discipline as etymology.
1
Says the preface to the Sixth Report of the Geographic Board, 1890 to 1932:
2
Many of the sounds occurring in the vocables of the Indian languages were strange to the early colonists. Some of them were quite unknown to the European languages. Hence the utterance and proper apprehension of these sounds were naturally subject to the influence of two effective causes of phonetic change and corruption, namely, (1) orosis, or the mishearing and misapprehension of the sounds uttered by the Indians, and (2) the tendency to compression and abbreviation of words in order to achieve ease of utterance. Conversely, the effect of these two causes was also influenced by the phonetics peculiar to the vernacular language of the recorder – whether it was Swedish, Dutch, French, English, Spanish or Russian. Such a recorder has a strong tendency to imagine that he heard sounds peculiar to his own mother tongue, and the availing records bear clear testimony to this fact. Some sounds common to the Indian languages were not apprehended at all, which often became the source of false identification of terms with other quite unrelated words.
The Indians themselves often forgot the meaning of their names for hills, meadows and streams: they became simply arbitrary words, like so many of our own proper nouns. Moreover, one tribe frequently borrowed a name from another using a different language or dialect, and had no more idea of its significance than we have today. Thus the Hurons got the name
Susquehanna
, meaning a muddy river, from the Delawares, and presently transformed it into a meaningless word which went into French as
Andastoei
and then into English as
Conestoga
, and in English became the name of a branch of the Susquehanna, of a town on that branch, and of a heavy wagon first built in the vicinity.
3
A crude folk-etymology
often transformed Indian names into forms that seemed (and still seem) to be of English origin. There is, for example,
Crow Wing
, the name of a village in Minnesota, which was originally
Kakaki-wing
, a Chippewa term meaning “at the place of the raven.” The first two syllables were more or less correctly translated as
crow
, but
wing
was mistaken for the English word, though there was no reference to wings in the Indian name.
Port Tobacco
in Maryland, originally
Pentapang
or
Pootuppag
, was transmuted into its present form when the early colonists began loading tobacco in an adjacent arm of the Potomac. The
Rockaways
on Long Island were originally
Reckawackes
and seem to have got into English by way of Dutch;
Loyalhanna
and
Loyalsock
, two Pennsylvania townships, were originally
Laweelhanna
and
Lawisaquik
,
1
and
Tia Juana
(California), which seems to be Spanish for
Aunt Jane
, is actually an Indian term,
tiwana
, meaning “by the sea.”
2
Many other non-English place-names have been subjected to the same barbarization. The
Low Freight
, a stream in Arkansas, was originally the French
L’Eau Froid;
the
Ambrosia
in Indiana was the French
Embarras; Gramercy Park
in New York City was the Dutch
Kromme Zee
(crooked lake);
Baraboo
in Wisconsin was the French
Baribault; Waco
in Texas was the Spanish
Hueco
and so on.
3
Numerous bastard names have been formed by outfitting non-English stems with English indicators,
e.g., Romeroville, Glenrico, Point Loma, Ninaview
4
and
Pass aux Huitres
5
and this process is still in full blast, especially in the naming of new resorts and suburbs,
e.g., Buena Park
and
Mount Alta
. Non-English names are naturally
most prevalent in the areas in which the languages from which they come have been most spoken,
e.g
., Spanish in the Southwest,
1
German in Pennsylvania,
2
Dutch in New York, French in Louisiana
3
and along the Canadian border, and Scandinavian in Minnesota.
4
But some of them have wandered far, so that there are substantial numbers of Spanish names in Pennsylvania, and of German names in California.
5
In most cases they were carried by immigrants, but returned soldiers also had something to do with it – for example, after the Mexican War.
When an Indian name is borne by a place of any importance its spelling and pronunciation tend to become more or less fixed, as we have seen in the case of
Milwaukee
, but there is seldom any agreement about the names of smaller places. The Geographic Board and its successor, the Board on Geographical Names, have spent a great deal of time and energy settling such differences. The former, taking up the problem of determining the true name of a small lake in New Hampshire, was confronted by no less than 132 different forms. It finally decided upon
Winnepesaukee
, but soon afterward found reason to change to
Winnipesaukee
. The familiar
Mohawk
, the name of a river, a valley, a lake, a town and various villages in New York State, appears in the literature of the early frontier in 142 spellings, all coming down, apparently, from an Iroquois word
maqua
or
mahaqua
, meaning a bear. Even
Seneca
has been spelled in 110 ways, and
Oneida
in 103. Some of the Indian names that survive in remote places are very formidable,
e.g., Souadabscook, Quenshukeny
,
6
Kiskiminetas, Quohquinapassakessamanagnog
1
Chargoggagaugmanchaugagoggchaubunagungamaugg
.
2
Worse, not a few of them, when their original meanings are dredged up, turn out to be opprobrious or obscene. The Indians often had several or even many names for the same place, and some of them were far from flattering. In other instances they had no names at all, for what was huge, obvious and inescapable seemed to them to be hardly worth naming. When a white colonist, in the former case, pressed them for the name of some river, valley or hill they sometimes gave him the worst one current, and in the latter case they replied with the aboriginal equivalent of “That is a river” or “Go to hell!”
3
The most reliable opinion today is to the effect that
Chicago
, as the sportive Indians imparted it to the first whites, meant “the place of strong smells” or
Skunktown
.
4
At different times in the past it has been spelled
Cheggago, Cheegago, Tzstchago, Stktschagko, Chirgago, Shecago, Shikkago, Shercaggo, Schenkakko, Zheekako, Ztschaggo, Chiccago, Checago, Chicawgo, Chikkago, Chiggago, Shakakko, Schuerkaigo, Psceschaggo, Stkachango
and
Tschakko
.
5
The early English settlers were dull dogs, and, as Stewart has
noted, very few of the names they bestowed upon the land showed any imagination. The Pilgrim Fathers could think of nothing better than
Plymouth Rock
to call the place of their landing, and their opposite numbers in Virginia, though they succumbed to a few lovely Indian names, displaced many others with such banalities as
James, York, Charles, Henry, Williamsburg
and
Richmond
.
1
So many of the place-names of New England are mere repetitions of the names of English towns that there is a Namesake Town Association there,
2
with a long membership and a longer list of eligibles. “The determination of the colonists,” said the
Knickerbocker Magazine
in 1837,
3
“was to eradicate everything that perpetuated the native tribes, and the ancient names of
Naumkeag, Shawmut
and
Mooseasuck
gave place to …
Salem, Boston
and
Providence
.” The same loan was used over and over again, and to this day there are sixteen towns with names based on
Newton
within a few miles of Boston.
4
Nor was there much improvement when the ties with the Motherland began to loosen. The first patriot to think of calling some frontier village
Washington
had immediate and numerous imitators and by 1839, according to Captain Frederick Marryat,
5
there were already 43
Washingtons
on the American map, with 41
Jacksons
, 32
Jeffersons
, 31
Franklins
, 26
Madisons
, 25
Monroes
, 22
Perrys
, 14
Lafayettes
and 13
Hamiltons
following.
6
Hundreds of names were made by prefixing
New
to some existing name,
7
or
by borrowing the name of some local animal or tree. Both processes were followed by the pioneers who penetrated to the eastern end of Lake Erie toward the close of the Eighteenth Century. First, with gorgeous lack of humor, they called their village of sticks and mud
New Amsterdam
and then they switched to
Buffalo
, which was instantly borrowed for scores of other hamlets in what was then the Far West.