Henry Lorne Masta

This voice from history was recorded in print before the internet, before recording media (except possibly the wax cylinders and earliest one sided records), and definitely long before television. The grammatical sentence structure is of interest to me, but the little stories of several paragraphs that are translated in their entirety, with footnotes, are often humorous.

The grace of the language, the meaning of northeast place names and explanations of little bits of culture are melancholy reminders of what can be lost when a language goes extinct or nearly extinct. The revival of Scots Gaelic and other languages around the world can give us a little window into a past culture. I particularly loved the 1911 photo of the author's beautiful daughter dressed as "The Bouquet Girl". The banter about the Kwenitek River ("Is it really long? It would not be so called if it was not so.") can be appreciated from Hartford to New Haven (Connecticut). After the Dutch applied their attempts to spell the place names as they heard them and then the English took a stab at their spelling, it is no wonder that we don't remember the origins and can't begin to guess the meanings of the strange names. It is worth remembering though, that besides place names, we have taken many Abenaki words into our culture and claimed them as our own (reference canoe, toboggan, skunk, raccoon and many others).

Many thanks to Bowman Books for keeping this treasure in print, Wliwni!… (más)