those who essayed, as interpreters, teachers, and preachers, to master the tongue, as to the construction and compass of the language, and the difficulties or facilities of its acquisition. It would seem that of it, as of other languages, ancient and modern, barbarous or cultivated, written or unwritten, it was easy to catch enough of it for the common intercourse of life in the woods, the wigwam, or traffic. The embarrassment of communication in it increased according to the importance or dignity of the theme. Mr. William Leverich, a very successful preacher to the Indians in Sandwich, Mass., wrote, in 1651: —
“I cannot but reckon it a matter of success and encouragement
that, though the Indian tongue be very difficult, irregular, and
anomalous, and wherein I cannot meet with a verb substantive as
yet, nor any such particles as conjunctions, etc., which are essential
to the several sorts of axioms, and consequently to all rational and
perfect discourses, and that though their words are generally very
long, even sesquipidalia verba, yet I find — God helping — not only
myself to learn and attain more of it in a short time than I could of
Latin, Greek, or Hebrew in the like space of time, when my memory
was stronger, and when all known rules of art are helpful to fasten
such notions in the mind of the learner; but also the Indians to
understand me fully (as they acknowledge), so far as I have gone.
I am constrained by many ambages and circumlocutions to supply
the former defect, to express myself to them as I
may.”[1]
Eliot seems even to intimate that Cotton of Plymouth
was his superior in a mastery of the Indian tongue, and
he relied largely upon Cotton's aid in his translation and
printing of the Scriptures. He gave two full years of close
study and practical trial of the language before he ventured
to preach in it. Feeling that the time had fully come to
justify the experiment, he invited the petty chief Waban
and some of his Indians to gather near his wigwam, under
an oak tree on a hill in Nonantum, now Newton, Mass.; and
on the 28th of October, 1646, he discoursed to them in their
- ↑ The Further Progress of the Gospel, etc.
