APS Historical and Literary Committee American Indian Vocabulary Collection

APS Historical and Literary Committee American Indian Vocabulary Collection

APS Historical and Literary Committee

1784-1828

The indigenous languages of the Americas first became a significant interest at the American Philosophical Society under the Society's third President, Thomas Jefferson. In his Notes on the State of Virginia (1783), Jefferson had laid the conceptual foundation for reconstructing a history of Indian peoples based upon a systematic analysis of their languages, and while he collected some vocabularies himself to that end, he was remarkably effective at spurring others. Most famously, in about 1791 he had a form printed that included a standard vocabulary of about 280 English words with adjacent blanks in which Indian equivalents were to be recorded. Distributed to his friends, military officers, and others likely to come into contact with Indians, the forms were returned to Jefferson for analysis, and over the course of decade, he accumulated over 400 vocabularies. Unfortuantely, many of these were destroyed in 1809, with the remainder arriving at the APS in 1817.

Since Jefferson's initial efforts, several other APS members have contributed to the project. The Historical and Literary Committee took a special interest in Indian vocabularies, as they did in other historical documents, publishing an important collection of them as the first volume of their Transactions in 1816. The head of the committee, Peter Stephen Du Ponceau, prefaced this volume with the statement that he was not wedded to any particular theory of Indian origins, but wished only to obtain a "bird's eye view" of them all to guage the depth of linguistic diversity in North America and to discern how these languages relate to those of the Old World. The APS has collected materials on Indian languages continuously since that time.

Atacapase
Cherokee 
Chickasaw 
Chippewa 
Choctaw 
Chontal 
Creek
Delaware
Massachusett
Miami
Micmac
Mohegan
Munsee
Nanticoke
Osage
Quapaw
Quinnipiac
Taino
Unquachog

Indians of North America--Languages
Language and Linguistics
Linguistics

Among several other Indian language collections at the APS, two are directly related to the Historical and Literary Committee Collection:

Thomas Jefferson's comparative vocabulary ( Call no. 497.3 J35), which includes Du Ponceau's Indian Vocabulary Collection ( Call no. 497.3 In2) includes information on 73 languages. The North American languages recorded by Du Ponceau provided the basis for Albert Gallatin's "A Synopsis of the Indian Tribes Within the United States East of the Rocky Mountains and in the British and Russian Possessions in North America," Transactions and Collections of the American Antiquarian Society 2 (1836): 1-422.

http://www.amphilsoc.org/collections/view?docId=ead/Mss.497.V85-ead.xml

Acquired by the Historical and Literary Committee of the APS from John G. E. Heckewelder, Peter Stephen Du Ponceau, Thomas Jefferson and others, 1816-1828.

Mss.497.V85

Cite as: American Indian Vocabulary Collection, American Philosophical Society.

Peter S. Du Ponceau, "Report of the Corresponding Secretary...," Transactions of the Historical and Literary Committee of the American Philosophical Society 1 (1819): xvii-1.