American Indian Culture and Research Journal

When the Europeans began to come to stay in North America in the seventeenth century, they found a completely new horizon, not only in flora and fauna, climate and geography, but also in the people they encountered. Differences between Europeans and North Americans in physique, dress, customs, manners , and economy all stood out with great clarity. With similar clarity, the differences in language stood out. The languages the Europeans encountered were unlike any they had encountered before, not only in sound and structure but also in the social settings in which they were found. In Europe there were but few languages, which were spoken by large numbers of people-hundreds of thousands, if not millions, in some cases, such as English and French; in North America, there were dozens of languages, spoken by very small speech communities in the hundreds of thousands. In Mexico and Peru, where the Aztec and Inca empires flourished, the language structure was imperial, with subject peoples continuing to speak their own languages even though many learned that of the rulers of the empire. Furthermore, the European languages, as welI as the languages Europeans had encountered in the Middle East and in Asia, were written languages, with grammatical and literary traditions. The languages of North America were neither written nor did they have such traditions. They presented an uncharted sea of variation and diversity. So the newness and unexpectedness of the languages and those who spoke them had their impact on the Europeans. Faced with these new languages, along with the new cultures and customs, the Europeans set about to record and describe the new linguistic horizon as best they could. The recording and description of languages, which here will be our major concern, was admittedly a secondary linguistic task for the Europeans. Their first concern was to learn the languages they had come in contact with; the second was to write down what they had learned. This recording they did as best they could within the intellectual framework that was available to them and in the absence of native literary or grammatical traditions to use as a guide-much early description of North American languages sounds like a description of Latin or Greek, or even Hebrew- and with a great variety of success and failure. But record they did, and the result was a fairly large body of writings of various sorts- dictionaries, word lists, phrase books, translations (mostly of the holy scriptures), grammatical disquisitions, and the like. The pattern of European response to North American languages can be organized in terms of a cycle that seems to repeat itself throughout the history of this response. The sequence includes, first, the response of explorers and travelers; second, that of missionaries; third, that of scholars. From the earliest times of Europeans in North America this triad of explorer, missionary, and scholar has reacted and interacted with the languages encountered, and the result of this interaction is a large, sophisticated body of data and techniques that has contributed greatly to the development of linguistics, and to the preservation, analysis, and even the spread of the languages concerned.