American Philosophical Society Historical and Literary Committee American Indian Vocabulary Collection, American Philosophical Society

Table of contents

Abstract

Beginning in the 1790s, the American Philosophical Society began to accumulate vocabularies and texts written in Native American languages, guided by Thomas Jefferson's idea of using comparative linguistics to reconstruct the histories of Indian peoples and discern their origins.

The American Indian Vocabularies Collection was initially assembled by the Historical and Literary Committee of the APS for publication in 1816. They include information on seventeen North American languages and one each from the Caribbean and Central America, collected between 1784 and 1828. A number of individuals were invovled in recording the vocabularies, including Benjamin Hawkins, William Thornton, David Campbell, Daniel Smith, Constantine Volney, Constantine Rafinesque, William Vans Murray, John Heckewelder, Martin Duralde, Campanius Holm, and Jefferson himself. Most followed the standardized word set established by Jefferson.

Background note
Scope & content
Administrative information
Additional information
- Related material
- Bibliography
Added entries
Contact information
Collection inventory
- Vocabularies and Correspondence, 1784-1828

Background note

The indigenous languages of the Americas first became a significant interest at the American Philosophical Society under the Society's third President, Thomas Jefferson. In his Notes on the State of Virginia (1783), Jefferson had laid the conceptual foundation for reconstructing a history of Indian peoples based upon a systematic analysis of their languages, and while he collected some vocabularies himself to that end, he was remarkably effective at spurring others. Most famously, in about 1791 he had a form printed that included a standard vocabulary of about 280 English words with adjacent blanks in which Indian equivalents were to be recorded. Distributed to his friends, military officers, and others likely to come into contact with Indians, the forms were returned to Jefferson for analysis, and over the course of decade, he accumulated over 400 vocabularies. Unfortuantely, many of these were destroyed in 1809, with the remainder arriving at the APS in 1817.

Since Jefferson's initial efforts, several other APS members have contributed to the project. The Historical and Literary Committee took a special interest in Indian vocabularies, as they did in other historical documents, publishing an important collection of them as the first volume of their Transactions in 1816. The head of the committee, Peter Stephen Duponceau, prefaced this volume with the statement that he was not wedded to any particular theory of Indian origins, but wished only to obtain a "bird's eye view" of them all to guage the depth of linguistic diversity in North America and to discern how these languages relate to those of the Old World. The APS has collected materials on Indian languages continuously since that time.

Scope and content

The vocabularies comprising the American Indian Vocabulary Collection were assembled by the Historical and Literary Committee in 1816, when preparing for the first volume of their Transactions. The resulting collection consists of 23 vocabularies of 19 languages collected between 1784 to 1828, along with letters of transmittal and other associated information. A number of individuals were invovled in recording the vocabularies, including Benjamin Hawkins, William Thornton, David Campbell, Daniel Smith, Constantine Volney, Constantine Rafinesque, William Vans Murray, John Heckewelder, Martin Duralde, Campanius Holm, and Jefferson himself.

The majority of the vocabularies record languages in what is now the eastern half of the United States, ranging from Osage, Quapaw, and Shawnee in the lower Mississippi Valley to Natick and Mohegan in New England. Rafinesque submitted vocabularies for two non-North American languages, the extinct Taino language of Haiti and for Chontal in Central America, and Jefferson himself recorded one vocabulary, Unquachog from the Pusspatock settlement near Brookhaven, Long Island.

Administrative information

Restrictions

None.

Provenance

Acquired by the Historical and Literary Committee of the APS from John G. E. Heckewelder, Peter Stephen Duponceau, Thomas Jefferson and others, 1816-1828.

Preferred citation

Cite as: American Indian Vocabulary Collection, American Philosophical Society.

Processing information

Recatalogued by rsc, 2002.

Other finding aids

The vocabularies are also described in the APS on-line Guide to Mansucripts Relating to the American Indian.

Additional information

Related material

Among several other Indian language collections at the APS, two are directly related to the Historical and Literary Committee Collection:

Thomas Jefferson's comparative vocabulary (Call no. 497.3 J35), which includes

Duponceau's Indian Vocabulary Collection (Call no. 497.3 In2) includes information on 73 languages. The North American languages recorded by Duponceau provided the basis for Albert Gallatin's "A Synopsis of the Indian Tribes Within the United States East of the Rocky Moutnains and in the British and Russian Possessions in North America," Transactions and Collections of the American Antiquarian Society 2 (1836): 1-422.

References

Peter S. Duponceau, "Report of the Corresponding Secretary...," Transactions of the Historical and Literary Committee of the American Philosophical Society 1 (1819): xvii-1.