[Footnote 90:  Haldeman’s Analytic Orthography, Sec.279, and “Etymology as a means of Education,” in Pennsylvania School Journal for October, 1868.]

[Footnote 91:  “Swatawro,” on Sayer and Bennett’s Map, 1775.]

[Footnote 92:  “Whiskey Jack,” the name by which the Canada Jay (Perisoreus Canadensis) is best known to the lumbermen and hunters of Maine and Canada, is the Montagnais Ouishcatcha[n] (Cree, Ouiskeshauneesh), which has passed perhaps through the transitional forms of ‘Ouiske Jean’ and ‘Whiskey Johnny.’  The Shagbark Hickory nuts, in the dialect of the Abnakis called s’k[oo]skada’mennar, literally, ‘nuts to be cracked with the teeth,’ are the ‘Kuskatominies’ and ‘Kisky Thomas’ nuts of descendants of the Dutch colonists of New Jersey and New York.  A contraction of the plural form of a Massachusetts noun-generic,—­asquash, denoting ’things which are eaten green, or without cooking,’ was adopted as the name of a garden vegetable,—­with conscious reference, perhaps, to the old English word squash, meaning ‘something soft or immature.’  Sometimes etymology overreaches itself, by regarding an aboriginal name as the corrupt form of a foreign one.  Thus the maskalonge or ’great long-nose’ of the St. Lawrence (see p. 43) has been reputed of French extraction,—­masque elonge:  and sagackomi, the northern name of a plant used as a substitute for or to mix with tobacco,—­especially, of the Bearberry, Arctostaphylos uva-ursi,—­is resolved into sac-a-commis, “on account of the Hudson’s Bay officers carrying it in bags for smoking,” as Sir John Richardson believed (Arctic Searching Expedition, ii. 303).  It was left for the ingenuity of a Westminster Reviewer to discover that barbecue (denoting, in the language of the Indians of Guiana, a wooden frame or grille on which all kinds of flesh and fish were dry-roasted, or cured in smoke,) might be a corruption of the French barbe a queue, i.e. ’from snout to tail;’ a suggestion which appears to have found favor with lexicographers.]

In Connecticut and Rhode Island special causes operated to corrupt and transform almost beyond possibility of recognition, many of the Indian place names.  Five different dialects at least were spoken between Narragansett Bay and the Housatonic River, at the time of the first coming of the English.  In early deeds and conveyances in the colonial and in local records, we find the same river, lake, tract of land or bound-mark named sometimes in the Muhhekan, sometimes in the Narragansett, or Niantic, or Nipmuck, or Connecticut valley, or Quinnipiac (Quiripee) dialect.  The adopted name is often extra-limitary to the tribe by which it was given.  Often, it is a mixture of, or a sort of compromise between, two dialects; half Muhhekan, half Narragansett or Nipmuck.  In the form in which it comes to us, we can only guess from what language or languages it has been corrupted.