Nottoway , also called ''Cheroenhaka'', was a language spoken by the
Nottoway people
The Nottoway are an Iroquoian Native American tribe in Virginia. The Nottoway spoke a Nottoway language in the Iroquoian language family.
Names
The term ''Nottoway'' may derive from ''Nadawa'' or ''Nadowessioux'' (widely translated as "poison ...
. Nottoway is closely related to
Tuscarora Tuscarora may refer to the following:
First nations and Native American people and culture
* Tuscarora people
**''Federal Power Commission v. Tuscarora Indian Nation'' (1960)
* Tuscarora language, an Iroquoian language of the Tuscarora people
* ...
within the
Iroquoian language family. Two tribes of Nottoway are recognized by the state of
Virginia
Virginia, officially the Commonwealth of Virginia, is a state in the Mid-Atlantic and Southeastern regions of the United States, between the Atlantic Coast and the Appalachian Mountains. The geography and climate of the Commonwealth ar ...
: the Nottoway Indian Tribe of Virginia and the Cheroenhaka (Nottoway) Indian Tribe. Other Nottoway descendants live in
Wisconsin
Wisconsin () is a state in the upper Midwestern United States. Wisconsin is the 25th-largest state by total area and the 20th-most populous. It is bordered by Minnesota to the west, Iowa to the southwest, Illinois to the south, Lake M ...
and
Canada
Canada is a country in North America. Its ten provinces and three territories extend from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean and northward into the Arctic Ocean, covering over , making it the world's second-largest country by tot ...
, where some of their ancestors fled in the 18th century. The last known speaker,
Edith Turner
Edith Turner (ca. 1754 – February or March 1838), sometimes known as Edy Turner or Edie Turner, or by her personal name Wané Roonseraw, was a leader – often styled "chief" or "queen" – among the Nottoway people of Virginia in the eighteenth ...
, died in 1838. The Nottoway people are undertaking work for language revival.
Knowledge of Nottoway comes primarily from a word list collected on March 4, 1820. Former President
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson (April 13, 1743 – July 4, 1826) was an American statesman, diplomat, lawyer, architect, philosopher, and Founding Fathers of the United States, Founding Father who served as the third president of the United States from 18 ...
’s handwritten letter to
Peter S. Du Ponceau, on July 7, 1820, states that a Nottoway Indian vocabulary was obtained on March 4th, 1820 from Edith Turner, styled as their “Queen,” by
John Wood, a former Professor of Mathematics at the
College of William and Mary
The College of William & Mary (officially The College of William and Mary in Virginia, abbreviated as William & Mary, W&M) is a public research university in Williamsburg, Virginia. Founded in 1693 by letters patent issued by King William III a ...
. Du Ponceau recognized the language immediately as Iroquoian, writing that he was "struck as well as astonished at its decided Iroquois Physiognomy."
[Peter S. DuPonceau to Thomas Jefferson, July 12, 1820](_blank)
''The Thomas Jefferson Papers'', Series 1, The Library of Congress. Blair A. Rudes
Blair Arnold Rudes (May 18, 1951 – March 16, 2008) was an American linguist and professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte best known for his expertise in Native American languages. He was hired in 2004 to reconstruct the long e ...
(1981) concluded that Nottoway is a distinct language from Tuscarora, but closest to Tuscarora within Iroquoian.
In addition to the vocabulary collected by John Wood, a few additional words were gathered by
James Trezvant
James Trezvant (died September 2, 1841) was a U.S. Representative from Virginia. He was also a slave owner.
Biography
Born in Sussex County, Virginia, Trezvant studied law after college. He was admitted to the bar and began practicing law in ...
.
Phonology
Vowels
By comparing words in Wood’s vocabulary with cognates in other Iroquoian languages, Blair Rudes (1981) was able to reconstruct the phonemes of Nottoway. According to Rudes, Nottoway has five vowel
phoneme
In phonology and linguistics, a phoneme () is a unit of sound that can distinguish one word from another in a particular language.
For example, in most dialects of English, with the notable exception of the West Midlands and the north-west o ...
s as seen in the following table.
These symbols, which Rudes uses in his transcriptions, are consistent with the International Phonetic Alphabet (
IPA
IPA commonly refers to:
* India pale ale, a style of beer
* International Phonetic Alphabet, a system of phonetic notation
* Isopropyl alcohol, a chemical compound
IPA may also refer to:
Organizations International
* Insolvency Practitioners ...
). Note that the mid central vowel is
nasalized
In phonetics, nasalization (or nasalisation) is the production of a sound while the velum is lowered, so that some air escapes through the nose during the production of the sound by the mouth. An archetypal nasal sound is .
In the Internationa ...
.
Examples of these vowels are shown in the following table (from the Wood vocabulary).
Wood's spelling of Nottoway was based on English and was therefore not systematic. A comparison to Tuscarora
cognate
In historical linguistics, cognates or lexical cognates are sets of words in different languages that have been inherited in direct descent from an etymology, etymological ancestor in a proto-language, common parent language. Because language c ...
s in the rightmost column, however, provides evidence of Wood's intended vowel sound.
Consonants
Nottoway has ten consonant phonemes, listed in the table below. Like the vowels, these consonant phonemes were reconstructed by Rudes using John Wood's vocabulary and knowledge of related languages.
Most of the symbols that Rudes uses are the same as the IPA symbols. Where they differ, the IPA symbol is included in square brackets. The three labial consonants are in parentheses because these phonemes are only present in five words of the language, none of which are of Iroquoian descent. The letter ‘m’ also sometimes occurs at the end of a word after a vowel, but this is to indicate nasalization of the previous vowel, not the presence of the phoneme /m/.
The following table shows example words with each of these consonants (also from the Wood vocabulary).
Comparison to related languages (primarily Tuscarora) allowed Rudes to reconstruct some of the consonant phonemes (in bold).
Syllable structure
The English-based spelling Wood used makes it difficult to determine syllable structure. Most words, however, are consistent with the
syllable structure
A syllable is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds typically made up of a syllable nucleus (most often a vowel) with optional initial and final margins (typically, consonants). Syllables are often considered the phonological " ...
(C)V(C)(C):
An exception is words that begin with /kw/ (which may have been a complex segment):
There is also limited evidence that words could end in three consonants:
Consonant clusters must include /w/ or /s/, and possibly /n/. /w/ is the most common, but /s/ is still regularly seen in words like ''Whisk'' 'five'. The status of /n/ is uncertain since Wood used to represent
nasal vowel
A nasal vowel is a vowel that is produced with a lowering of the soft palate (or velum) so that the air flow escapes through the nose and the mouth simultaneously, as in the French vowel or Amoy []. By contrast, oral vowels are produced wit ...
s.
Aside from ''Whisk'' 'five', most content words are multisyllabic.
Grammar
Possessive prefixes
Rudes (1981) notes that Nottoway has two series of pronominal prefixes used for
inalienable
''InAlienable'' is a 2007 science fiction film with horror and comic elements, written and executive produced by Walter Koenig, and directed by Robert Dyke. It was the first collaboration of Koenig and Dyke since their 1989 production of ''Moon ...
and alienable possession. Inalienable nouns, such as body parts, are possessed with the prefix ''ge''- 'my': ''ge-snunke'' 'my hand', ''ge-tunke'' 'my belly'. Alienable nouns are possessed with the prefix ''ak''- 'my': ''ak-uhor'' '(my) old man', ''aqu-eianha'' '(my) boy'. These two series of pronominal prefixes are also used on verbs, where they indicate the agent and patient, respectively. The full set of prefixes is listed in the table below.
Other affixes
In addition to the possessive prefixes, Rudes identifies a number of other affixes appearing in the Wood vocabulary.
They are as follows:
Word order
Most of the written Nottoway materials are vocabularies rather than texts, so scholars can only make limited assumptions about the syntactic structure of the language. However, Rudes (1981) explains three syntactic characteristics that are supported by recorded Nottoway evidence:
1. The definite article precedes a noun, as in Tuscarora.
2. Of two adjacent nouns, the first noun modifies the second.
3. An adjective follows the noun it modifies, and most likely could also precede it.
Rudes tentatively reconstructs noun incorporation based on these examples:
Vocabulary
The following vocabulary is from Wood as cited in Rudes from the version Jefferson sent to Du Ponceau.
Nouns of the Universe
Of the Human Species
Of Animals
Division of Time
Domestic Articles
Adjectives
Numerals
Verbs
Other Words
Rudes attributes the following words to a vocabulary by
J. N. B. Hewitt
John Napoleon Brinton Hewitt (December 16, 1859 – October 14, 1937) was a linguist and ethnographer who specialized in Iroquoian and other Native American languages.
Hewitt was born on the Tuscarora Indian Reservation near Lewiston, New York. H ...
.
[Hewitt, J. N. B. n.d. Nottoway-Anonymous. BAE ms., National Anthropological Archives catalog no. 3603. Washington, D.C.] It may be a later version of the one gathered by Trezvant.
References
{{Iroquoian languages
Northern Iroquoian languages
Extinct languages of North America