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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A Labor of Love, October 30, 2002
This fine volume includes 1.)a host of background material about the Mahicans, their language, and the 18th century German missionaries who helped preserve it; 2.)a section for professional linguists, devoted to interesting dialectal features of Mahican, and delineating ways in which it diverged from other branches of Algonquian; and 3.)the actual dictionary, which offers three-way translations into and out of English, Mahican, and German.Johann Jacob Schmick was a German (Moravian) Protestant missionary, who sought (and won) many converts amongst the Mahican natives of what today is the northeastern United States. The Mahicans mostly lived along the Hudson River valley in New York, but they also sometimes ventured into far western Massachusetts, and along the Housatonic River in western Connecticut. The so-called Stockbridge indians, of western Massachusetts, were Mahicans. Schmick lived from 1714 to 1778, and his missionary work was done after 1751. He was a gifted and beloved musician, and schoolteacher, and he mastered the native Mahican tongue in around 1754. Carl Masthay has done a lot of work to reproduce Schmick's eighteenth century work, and to package it in such a way that anyone can appreciate it. That's why I've entitled this review "A labor of love" -- I'm referring to Carl Masthay's exemplary editorial work. Although now that I think of it, Schmick was certainly executing his own labor of love, in his day. Don't miss the "Background and Explanatory Description," given as an introduction right at the beginning of the volume. This section discusses the historic need for a dictionary of this sort, and Carl Masthay's motivation for compiling this edition of Schmick's old manuscript. It talks about the historic background of the old Moravian missionaries, and their interactions with the Mahicans. There is also a nice thumbnail sketch of the life and times of Johann Jacob Schmick in this section. Interestingly, Masthay also includes a discussion of the linguistic diversity in the land of Schmick's birth. and the psychological impact that this diversity could have had upon him. The rest of this section is mostly devoted to a technical (but accessible) discussion of Mahican's place amongst the Eastern Algonquian languages. There is also a small bibliography of books dealing with Mahican history, and a map of the provenance, the territory, of the Mahican tribe. David Pentland, the co-editor of the authoritative "Bibliography of Algonquian Linguistics," and one of the world's leading authorities on the topic, has contributed an historical phonology. If you come to this book from an interest in the Mahicans, rather than in linguistics, this section will probably just confuse you. Let me save you some trouble. This section can be skipped over, if you're impatient to get to the actual dictionary and start reading some Mahican hymns, etc. Pentland's section is written for trained linguists. It shows what some of the more important, regularly observed changes are believed to have occurred, as Mahican evolved from an earlier "Proto-Algonquian" language. Proto-Algonquian was an ancestor language of Mahican, in the same sense that Latin was an ancestor language of French, Spanish, Italian, etc. Algonquianists have painstakingly reconstructed this lost language, which was never written down, by applying established rules of linguistic change to Algonquian languages that exist today, and making logical inferences about what the languages were like at an earlier stage. To sum up -- read this section if you're prepared for it, but don't worry too much if it's over your head. Move on to the actual dictionary section. Relax. The dictionary itself is a lot of fun. Most verb paradigms are completely fleshed out, so all the work has kindly been done for you. It isn't necessary to get papercuts, referring back and forth to lists of suffixes, etc. Each word is translated from English to Mahican and also to German, in order to help students of the Mahicans in their Moravian context to make better sense of the relevant sources... The dictionary is 123 pages long. Each entry conveniently begins with its English translation. The entries are alphabetized by their English translations, which probably makes more sense than alphabetizing them by the Mahican words, considering that there are no living speakers of the language. However, in case there is a need, at the end of the book there is a Mahican/English glossary and index, alphabetized by the Mahican words. This terrific book is fascinating, and invaluable to have if you want to grapple with the old hymns. Two thumbs up!
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