in one compound locution, often leaving out the harsh consonants for the sake of euphony,”—­and repeated by Heckewelder,[94] when he wrote, that “in the Delaware and other American languages, parts or parcels of different words, sometimes a single sound or letter, are compounded together in an artificial manner so as to avoid the meeting of harsh or disagreeable sounds,” &c.  The “single sound or letter” the “one or more syllables,” were chosen not as “part or parcel” of a word but because of their inherent significance.  The Delaware “Pilape, a youth,” is not—­as Heckewelder and Duponceau represented it to be[95]—­“formed from pilsit, chaste, innocent, and lenape, a man,” but from PIL-(Mass. pen-, Abn. pir-,) strange, novel, unused (and hence) pure,—­and -A[N]PE (Mass. _-omp_, Abn. a[n]be) a male, vir.  It is true that the same roots are found in the two words PIL-sit (a participle of the verb-adjective pil-esu, ‘he is pure,’) and len-A[N]PE, ‘common man:’  but the statement that “one or more syllables” are taken from these words to form Pilape is inaccurate and misleading.  It might with as much truth be said that the English word boyhood is formed from selected syllables of boy-ish and man-hood; or that purity ‘compounds together in an artificial manner’ fractions of purify and qual_ity_.

[Footnote 93:  Correspondence of Duponceau and Heckewelder, in Trans.  Historical and Literary Committee of Am.  Philos.  Society, p. 403.]

[Footnote 94:  Ibid., p. 406.]

[Footnote 95:  Preface to Duponceau’s translation of Zeisberger’s Grammar, p. 21.  On Duponceau’s authority, Dr. Pickering accepted this analysis and gave it currency by repeating it, in his admirable paper on “Indian Languages,” in the Encyclopaedia Americana, vol. vi.]

We meet with similar analyses in almost every published list of Indian names.  Some examples have been given in the preceding pages of this paper,—­as in the interpretation of ‘Winnipisiogee’ (p. 32) by ’the beautiful water of the high place,’ s or [=e]s being regarded as the fractional representative of ‘kees, high.’ Pemigewasset has been translated by ‘crooked place of pines’ and ’crooked mountain pine place,’—­as if k[oo]-a, ‘a pine,’ or its plural k[oo]-ash, could dispense in composition with its significant base, k[oo], and appear by a grammatical formative only.

6.  No interpretation of a place-name is correct which makes bad grammar of the original.  The apparatus of Indian synthesis was cumbersome and perhaps inelegant, but it was nicely adjusted to its work.  The grammatical relations of words were never lost sight of.  The several components of a name had their established order, not dependent upon the will or skill of the composer.  When we read modern advertisements of “cheap gentlemen’s