DOCUMENTA LINGUISTICA “TO COLLECT AND PRESERVE SUCH INFORMATION AS MAY BE OBTAINED CONCERNING THE INDIAN LANGUAGES”: AN EARLY PROGRAM FOR AMERICANIST LINGUISTICS (1826) In 1826 James BARBOUR (1775-1842)1, who had been elected Secre- tary of War the previous year, issued a printed circular, dated May 152. This document, emanating from the head of the Department of War, is an archival piece of particular interest to those who study the history of Americanist linguistics. It was originally accompanied by three documents, intended to illustrate the task set out in the letter, viz. to record the Indian languages still spoken in the United States. The three documents were: (a) a model of a uniform vocabulary, conceived for the compiling of a basic word-list for each of the languages investigated; * Thanks are due to the Library of the American Philosophical Society (Philadelphia, PA) for permission to publish the materials edited here, and to the Belgian National Science Foundation (Secretary-General, Mr. José TRAEST) for providing Pierre SWIGGERS with a study-grant (1994) in order to conduct research in the APS Library. 1 James BARBOUR, a descendant of a Scotch family, was a native of Virginia, who acquired most of his education from his own reading and from the social life in which he participated. He entered the Virginia House of Delegates in 1798, where he supported the Virginia Resolutions. He was elected Speaker of the House of Delegates in 1809, and continued in this office until he was elected Governor of Virginia in January 1812. He was Senator in Congress from 1815 to 1825, officiating as President pro tempore of the Senate, and as Chairman of the Committees on Military Affairs and Foreign Rela- tions. During the presidential campaign of 1824, BARBOUR became a strong supporter of John Quincy ADAMS; in 1825 he was appointed by the latter as Secretary of War. Loyal to ADAMS, BARBOUR conducted successful negotiations with Governor TROUP of Georgia, in regard to the Indian question; he obtained a territorial government for the Indians west of the Mississippi. In May 1828 he was nominated minister to Great Britain, in succes- sion to Albert GALLATIN. After returning to Virginia in 1829 he participated for ten more years in the political life of his native state. After his retirement from politics, he served as a president of the Virginia Agricultural Society. On BARBOUR, see LANMAN (1876: 20) and Dictionary of American Biography vol. I (1928), p. 590-592. 2 The document is preserved in two copies at the Library of the American Philosophical Society (973: C 683: no. 112 and 497: V 85). It consists of a single printed page (21 cm ≈ 35 cm). For the listing of the second copy, see FREEMAN - SMITH (1980: 218, no. 1973). The document is edited and reproduced here with the kind permission of the American Philosophical Society. 222 R. GOODMAN - P. SWIGGERS (b) a model for the systematic organization of grammatical information on American Indian languages; (c) the first attempt to propose a genetic (partly geographical) classifica- tion of the Indian languages and dialects spoken by tribes living east of the Stony (i.e. Rocky) Mountains, in the form of a division into language families and dialects. The latter document is a broadside3 containing Albert GALLATIN’s (1761-1849) table of North American native languages (“A Table of Indian tribes of the United States, East of the Stony Mountains, arranged according to languages and dialects”). The two other documents, both apparently anonymous, which accompanied the circular, viz. a “uniform vocabulary” and a model-list for eliciting grammatical information, have not been preserved, and we have to base ourselves on the description given in the circular for a reconstruction of their contents4. The vocabu- lary list mentioned as paper no. 1 seems to have been a revised, and amended5, version of the JEFFERSON vocabulary list. We know of at least 3 For a study of this document (GALLATIN 1826), which also includes a photographic reproduction of the broadside, see GOODMAN - SWIGGERS (1993). 4 See also GALLATIN (1836: 1; “Prefatory Letter”): “My first attempt was made in the year 1823, at the request of a distinguished friend, Baron Alexander Humboldt. It was that essay, communicated it seems to Mr. Balbi, and quoted by him with more praise than it deserved, in the Introduction to his “Atlas Ethnographique”, which drew the attention of the Antiquarian Society, and induced it to ask me for a copy. I had not kept any, but had in the mean while collected and obtained access to many important materials. In the winter of 1825-6, the attendance at Washington of a numerous delegation of southern Indians enabled me to obtain good vocabularies of the Muskhogee, Uchee, Natchez, Chicasa, and Cherokee; and I then published a table of all the existing tribes in the United States, which, in its arrangement, does not differ materially from that now adopted. The War Department circulated at the same time, at my request, printed forms of a vocabulary containing six hundred words, of verbal forms, and of selected sentences; and also a series of grammatical queries. The only communication, received in answer to those queries, is that of the Rev. Mr. Worcester respecting the Cherokee, which is inserted in the Appendix. The verbal forms and select sentences in that language, the verbal forms of the Muskhogee, Chocta, and Caddo, and the copious supplementary vocabularies in the same tongues, and in the Mohawk and Seneca, were also received in answer; and that of the Chippeway, by Dr. James (Appendix to Tanner’s account), is partly on the same model”. 5 Apparently on the basis of the items covered in PALLAS's vocabularies (PALLAS 1787-1789). On PALLAS, see POGGENDORFF (1863: 348), ESAKOV (1974), and the entry “Pallas, Peter Simon” in Enciclopedia italiana di scienze, lettere ed arti vol. 26, p. 122- 123. It should be noted that already in 1819 Walter BROMLEY compiled a list of Micmac words and grammatical forms which prefigures the rearrangement of the vocabulary list by GALLATIN as well as the 1826 list for eliciting grammatical information: see W. BROMLEY, “A Few Specimens of the Verbs of the Micmac Indians” and “Vocabulary of the Lan- guage of the Micmacs, as spoken in Nova Scotia” (manuscripts conserved in the APS Library; see FREEMAN - SMITH 1980: 241, nos. 2237, 2239). BROMLEY’s materials were used by GALLATIN (1836). AN EARLY PROGRAM FOR AMERICAN LINGUISTICS (1826) 223 two vocabularies that have been composed after this model, viz. SCHOOLCRAFT’s “Algic” [i.e. Chippewa] vocabulary6, and BOILVIN’s “Vocabulary of Sundry”7, which displays some modifications. The vocabulary was grouped around a number of keynotions, such as “God” (with various terms attached to it: “Spirit”, “Worship”, “Ceremony”, “Initiation”, etc.), “Man” (attached to it: “Indian”, “White man”, “Woman”, “Boy”, “Girl”, “Father”, etc.), “Head” (attached to it: the terms for parts of the head, and then terms for other parts of the body), “Nation” (attached to it: “Tribe”, “Clan”, “Country”, “Territory”, etc.), “House” (attached to it: “Hut”, “Door”, “Field”, “Harrow”, etc.), “Sky” (attached to it: names for celestial bodies, meteorological phenom- ena, seasons). As to the second paper accompanying the circular, this seems to have been a (sketchy) outline for typological description, containing a model for eliciting and taking down (only?) a complete verbal paradigm (with the verb to tie serving as the elicitation model)8; to judge from the circular, the outline was very incomplete and by no means compulsory, and its intended application was restricted to the major representatives of each language family. “The paper has been drawn by way of illustration, and not with a view of prescribing any rule. Other sentences may be added or substituted, if thought necessary or preferable. To the conjugation of the verb to tie, that of any other may be substituted; and, as far as practicable, one of the 6 See “Vocabulary of the Algic, or Chippeway Language” in MCKENNEY (1827: 487- 494). 7 For this vocabulary, see P.S. DU PONCEAU, Indian vocabularies (manuscript APS Library 497 IN 2), # 64 (p. 186-187): “Vocabulary of Sundry (Hoh-chungeérah) or Wineebaagoa, words for Col. L. McKenney by Mr Boilvin, Senr. – Indian agent – Prairie des chien [sic] 1826” (cf. FREEMAN - SMITH 1980: 382, no. 3864). This vocabulary was also used by GALLATIN (1836). Most of the other vocabularies collected by DU PONCEAU are based on the earlier JEFFERSON model. 8 The paper probably contained the outline of the questionnaire which lies at the basis of the collection of “specimens of simple conjugations and transitions” that we find in GALLATIN (1836: 267-300). On GALLATIN’s publications concerning Indian languages, see WALTERS (1957: 352-355), who does not mention the 1826 broadside. For the publi- cation history of GALLATIN (1836), see WALTERS (1957: 352): “Although he had to drop active work on the Indians when he accepted the mission to London in 1823, data in response to queries he had circulated kept dribbling in during his absence. His zeal was renewed late in 1831 when the head of the publications committee of the American Anti- quarian Society at Worcester, Massachusetts, having come across the reference to his work in Balbi’s Introduction à l’atlas ethnographique du globe, wrote to inquire whether he had anything on the subject that the society might publish. For the next eighteen months Gallatin devoted himself to the project, canvassing sources, amassing, collating, and analyzing data. From his own pocket he advanced several hundred dollars to pay the expenses of transcribers at learned societies in Philadelphia, Boston, as well as New York. The Society published his manuscript at its expense in November, 1836, and elected him a member”.