43 Variant English Spellings of Virginia and Maryland Indian Place-Names Before 1620
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43 Variant English Spellings of Virginia and Maryland Indian Place-names Before 1620 Philip L. Barbour Louisville, Kentucky This is not a definitive onomatological etymological study. If it were, the proper place and time for presenting it would have been the Elizabethan hospital in London called "Bedlam". We are assembled here in Fredericton this weekend, I am convinced, modestly eager only to exchange factual knowledge and sane opinions to stimulate further investigation. It is with this in mind that I have been so foolhardy as to prepare these notes. "Place-names" is a compound word that is anathema to many serious students. It seems to involve crack-pottery, if I may advance such a neologism. Yet without the history, so- to-speak, implicit in surviving place-names, such matters as the habitat of the early Celts would be even more obscure than it is. In this instance, I would like to suggest one fashion in which place-names in Virginia and Maryland (and even a handful from North Carolina) can be of some help in trying to get at the phonetics of the Algonquian languages of dialects south of the Delaware group—Munsee, Unami, and so on. To accomplish this, because the only existing trans- scriptions are in English, we must know as much as possible about the sound of English at the time, say 1580 to 1630 for our present purpose, and to round out a half-century. In short, we are dealing with spoken English as then written from the adolescence of Shakespeare to the early manhood of John Milton. It is hardly necessary for me to add that this was par excellence the day of English literary glory, partly because it was the day when modern English was born. Spoken English was in a state of flux, phonetically and lexically. Written English, on the other hand, was constant as the north star. Ergo, to understand the transcriptions that survive we must puzzle out the relationship between the two. In 1971, I published a list of Virginia place-names that combined those shown on Captain John Smith's map with those included in his various writings (Barbour 1971). To these, I added a few of the variant spellings advanced by Smith's contemporaries, as well as some excentricities advanced by Smith's printers. This list runs to 216 names, including identical names for several villages, etc., and a few names not to be found in Smith. (Parenthetically, these will all be listed in my forthcoming edition of Smith's works, along with every variant spelling I have noted.) In addition to Smith, however, there are the names on the Smith/Zuh'iga map—I will explain the name in a moment—no accurate list of which has yet been published, so far as I know. Some years ago, I therefore made such a list when doing research at Simancas, near Valladolid, Spain, where the original map is to be found. Then only two or three years ago I returned there, made a correction or two, and now present the list as hopefully correct—"e. and o.e.", 44 errors, and omissions excepted, of course. While at Simancas this second time, I also made a list of all the pertinent names on the so-called "Velasco" map—I will explain this name also--but have not re-checked it. And to these I have now added the handful of names on the "Tindall" map. This leads me to a needed explanation. Robert Tindall, a gunner to Prince Henry, first drafted a map of the Jamestown area in 1607, and in 1608 made a copy thereof that survives in the British Library. Tindall's "Draughte of Virginia 1608" has been reproduced in, or redrawn for Brown 1890, Barbour 1969, and Cummings et.al. 1972. See the indices of these for further reference. Zuniga's map as well as Velasco's are also reproduced in these three works. In 1608 also, a more comprehensive map was sent from Jamestown to London. This map, or more likely a copy of it, was forwarded to Spain in September of that year by Don Pedro de Zuniga, Philip Ill's ambassador. This has been called "the Zuniga map", but I have boldly chosen to name it for John Smith also, for the simple reason that "C.S." (Captain Smith) is specifically posted next to Rassawek, where he was captured, and since his route from there to Werowocomoco and Jamestown in December 16 07 is equally specifically posted on the map. I believe that you will agree that nobody but Smith would have advertised his forced marches in such fashion. The Velasco map has conveniently been named for Don Alonso de Velasco, ambassador to London in 1611, who sent the map to Philip III in March of that year. Who drew this map is not known, but it is obvious that the cartographer used drawings or engravings by several hands as pointed out in Quinn's Roanoke Voyages (Quinn 1955:Vol. II, 851-852). To supplement these three maps, I have now added lists of place-names occurring in descriptive works, especially the documents and sketch maps mentioned in the same Roanoke Voyages, along with William Strachey's Historie of Travell (Strachey 1953) (left unfinished in 1612), and the documentary material collected by Susan Myra Kingsbury in her Records of the Virginia Company, which closes in 1626 (Kingsbury 1906). The end product of these lists, which is appended, contains nearly 300 names, including some that appear in Barbour 1971, but without the adequate mention of variants that is now supplied. In any case, a full list of known variant spellings would be little short of unmanageable, since one investigator has counted "about fifty" spellings of Paspahegh, alone (Foreman 1940:475). It should be remembered that the variants in my lists are derived from only six sources. Many others are to be found elsewhere, including Hodge's well-known Handbook (Hodge 1905) the g of r or ™morCommissionEarliessufficienindice* eWha readilt^st tfollowstReconnaissanceo^ul ,yreferencth thkavailablee Report,Calendar 1then^e est, o^ o, foidsf source r alread oathplace-namestudyf mere Stat.Historicaye . mentionedeTakelis Paperstsn ofolwitf rplace-namesManuscript, h, th anthIed believeare solis ao nstie ,s i witthanno mwtyh 45 In closing, I would like to add a few side remarks that may be of interest, at least to some of you. On pronunciation (Dobson 1968): The "diphthong" -ow- most likely represents the sound [ow] as in "Edgar Allen Poe", unless the Powhatan speech contained the sound of [aw] in "out" as pronounced in Toronto, or in Williamsburg--both in some circles only. The -ch- in variant spellings of Kiskiack and in the name Chickahominy may well have been closer to [ts] than to English [c] as in "church": the sound of -ty- in Hungarian, or the common Serbo-Croat surname-ending, -ic. On the basis of apparent etymology, the Ch- in such names as Chawopo represents a sound close to [S], English -sh-. The letters -i- and -y- may represent the sound of English "I" [ay], regardless of position: "neighbor" was sometimes written "nibor", and apparently pronounced to rhyme with "fiber." The -gh- so common in Smith, and occasionally in other sources most likely represents a light [h], regardless of position, or perhaps merely a length ening of the preceding vowel. Kecoughtan may have been written that way to represent the sound Keck'otan (or Kick-), as opposed to Keck'uhtan. The wavering between -e- and -i- in transcribing some words may point to an [i] sound, shorter than in English, and "purer"; as in French si, unstressed. A transcription such as Bapteptank points to an attempt to copy an ill-written original: based on malformation of some letters in the secretary hand, I suggest that this is a distortion of Kupkipkock. The Spanish transcription "Jacan" of "Ajacan" seems to point to a strong [x] or even [S] in some speech. The digraph -aw- seems to represent the sound of Italian or Spanish [a], which did not exist in English at the time--"father" then rhyming with modern American "rather." Possibly, the syllable containing -aw- should be stressed. Special notice: Those archaeologists and historians who have not yet heard of it, for good news travels slowly, Dr. Ben C. McCary and Dr. Norman F. Barka of Williamsburg have recently published "The John Smith and Zuniga Maps in the Light of Recent Archaeological Investigations Along the Chickahominy River" (McCary and Barka 1977). This report gives many details of the only deliberate attempt to tie archaeological discoveries with original maps and descriptions for a given geographical area. The results bear out the greater part of the early documents, and even confirm a few of the scribbled annotations in one copy of Smith's True Relation, to which reference was made above. 46 Note: Beyond the bibliographical abbreviations listed below, the following seem to be obvious: N,S, etc., stand for North, South, etc., up., mid., and low., stand for upper, middle and lower courses of rivers. In addition, since the letter -c- was inconsistently used, and could represent [k] or [s] sounds, names in which -c- appears are listed according to phonetic values; thus, Checepieck follows Chesepians, and Kaskarawak precedes Cassapecock. Combined List of Toponyms. Abbreviations (for details see References below): Kby. Kingsbury, Records. P.Z. The Smith/Zuniga map (1608). R.T. Tindall's "Draught" (1608). R.V. Quinn, The Roanoke Voyages. Vel. The so-called "Velasco" map (c. 1611). W.S. Strachey, "Historie of Travell" (ca. 1612). [Unnamed site in the Roanoke area] P.Z. "Here the king of Paspahegh reported our men to be a[n]d went to se[e]." [Unnamed site at Warraskoyack] P.Z.