Linguist Reconstructs Virginia Algonquian

"...The language and culture the English encountered really is a lost world," Rudes noted. "Virginia Algonquian is a member of the Algonquian family, a large group of languages which stretched across North America. On the East Coast there were perhaps 15 Algonquian languages and a lot of other languages. All the Eastern Algonquian languages except Passamaquoddy-Maliseet (a language still spoken by Native Americans in Maine and Canada) are extinct. They were among the first Native American languages to go extinct, because they were on the coast."

Malick was in luck because Rudes is also one of a handful of linguists who are authorities in the field of "language revitalization" -– the science of re-building lost languages. Rudes' science in turn, gave Malick a window into the past that was more profound than any found in the historical record. Aiming for realism, the movie sponsored the scientific resurrection of a lost culture's language. It was a more difficult job than the director probably suspected.

"Originally they wanted the language revived for one scene and done by the end of the month, in keeping with the production schedule," said Rudes. "But the records of the Virginia Algonquian language are, shall we say, limited.

"John Smith himself recorded about 50 words of the language and a secretary to the Jamestown colony named William Strachey published a work in 1612 – The Histotrie of Travell into Virginia Britania -- which contains about a 600 word vocabulary of Virginia Algonquian. 600 words, of course, is not a great deal. Webster's Unabridged College Dictionary of English has about 12,000 words," he noted.

With the vast majority of the language's many-thousand word vocabulary missing along with its syntax and pronunciation, Rudes had to re-build the language wholesale using the sophisticated techniques of historical linguistics. In the process, Rudes interpreted Strachey's amateur record (transcriptions of an unknown language recorded as heard by a 17th Century English ear), compared it with better-surviving records of a few related Algonquian languages as well as with words that have been passed down into English, and applied theory and scholarship on the evolution of the language family.

The process, which involves interpolating the evolution of pronunciation, syntax and meaning is complicated.

For example, consider the reconstruction of the Virginia Algonquian words that Strachey records for "walnut," "shoes," and two different "kinds of beast" : "paukauns," "mawcasuns," "aroughcoune" and "opposum" have passed into American English usage as "pecans," "moccasins," "raccoon" and "opossum" and can be compared to "paka•ni" (meaning "large nut"), "maxkesen," (meaning "shoe"), "la•le•kani" (meaning "raccoon") and "wa•pa’emwi" (meaning "white dog") words in Proto-Algonquian, the re-constructed ancestral language of Virginia Algonquian. From this, Rudes reconstructs the Virginia Algonquian words "pakaen," "mahkesen," "a•rehkan" and " wa•pahšem." ...

Everyday Life source


I find this especially interesting because I currently live in Virginia, U.S.