[Footnote 78:  On Indian Names, in Trans.  Am.  Philos.  Society, N.S. iv. 361.]

The difficulty of analyzing such names is greatly increased by the fact that they come to us in corrupt forms.  The same name may be found, in early records, written in a dozen different ways, and some three or four of these may admit of as many different translations.  Indian grammatical synthesis was exact.  Every consonant and every vowel had its office and its place.  Not one could be dropped or transposed, nor could one be added, without change of meaning.  Now most of the Indian local names were first written by men who cared nothing for their meaning and knew nothing of the languages to which they belonged.  Of the few who had learned to speak one or more of these languages, no two adopted the same way of writing them, and no one—­John Eliot excepted—­appears to have been at all careful to write the same word twice alike.  In the seventeenth century men took considerable liberties with the spelling of their own surnames and very large liberty with English polysyllables—­especially with local names.  Scribes who contrived to find five or six ways of writing ‘Hartford’ or ‘Wethersfield,’ were not likely to preserve uniformity in their dealings with Indian names.  A few letters more or less were of no great consequence, but, generally, the writers tried to keep on the safe side, by putting in as many as they could find room for; prefixing a c to every k, doubling every w and g, and tacking on a superfluous final e, for good measure.

In some instances, what is supposed to be an Indian place-name is in fact a personal name, borrowed from some sachem or chief who lived on or claimed to own the territory.  Names of this class are likely to give trouble to translators.  I was puzzled for a long time by ‘Mianus,’ the name of a stream between Stamford and Greenwich,—­till I remembered that Mayano, an Indian warrior (who was killed by Capt.  Patrick in 1643) had lived hereabouts; and on searching the Greenwich records, I found the stream was first mentioned as Moyannoes and Mehanno’s creek, and that it bounded ‘Moyannoe’s neck’ of land. Moosup river, which flows westerly through Plainfield into the Quinebaug and which has given names to a post-office and factory village, was formerly Moosup’s river,—­Moosup or Maussup being one of the aliases of a Narragansett sachem who is better known, in the history of Philip’s war, as Pessacus.  Heckewelder[79] restores ‘Pymatuning,’ the name of a place in Pennsylvania, to the Del. ‘Pihmtonink,’ meaning, “the dwelling place of the man with the crooked mouth, or the crooked man’s dwelling place,” and adds, that he “knew the man perfectly well,” who gave this name to the locality.

[Footnote 79:  On Indian Names (ut supra), p. 365.]