Alaska

21 February 2022

A 1774 English translation of the map of the Aleutian Islands, originally made by Jakob von Stæhlin, inaccuately depicting the Alaskan peninsula as an island bearing the name Alaschka

The name Alaska comes from the Aleut alaxsxix̣, meaning mainland, originally only a reference to the Alaska Peninsula, from which the Aleutian Islands extend. Later it was applied to the entire territory that would eventually become the state.

Russian explorers were the first Europeans to visit Alaska in the 1730s and again in 1741 when Vitus Bering led a Russian expedition there. The territory was colonized by the Russians in the late eighteenth century, mainly by fur traders. The United States purchased the territory from Russia in 1867. It became a state in 1959.

The first appearance of the name Alaska in an English context is on a map found in a 1774 translation of Jakob von Stæhlin’s An Account of the New Northern Archipelago. On the map, the Alaska Peninsula is depicted as an island and bears the name Alaschka I.

The name appears in the 1778 edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica in the entry for Kamchatka, in a section describing the Fox Islands, the part of the Aleutian chain closest to the mainland:

According to the reports of the oldest inhabitants of Umnak and Unalaska, they have never been engaged in any war, either amongst themselves or with their neighbours, except with the people of Alashka, the occasion of which was as follows. The son of the toigon or chief of Umnak had a maimed hand; and some inhabitants of Alashka, who came to visit upon that island, fastened to his arm a drum, out of mockery, and invited him to dance. The parents and relations of the boy were offended at this insult: hence a quarrel ensued; and from that time the people have lived in continual enmity, attacking and plundering each other by turns. According to the reports of the islanders, there are mountains upon Alashka, and woods of great extent at some distance from the coast. The natives wear cloaths made of the skins of reindeer, wolves, and foxes; and are not tributary to any of their neighbours. The inhabitants of the Fox-Islands seem to have no knowledge of any country beyond Alashka, which is one of the most easterly islands yet discovered in these seas, and is probably not far distant from the continent of America.

It appears again in 1780 in William Coxe’s Account of the Russian Discoveries Between Asia and America:

About 20 versts from the North East promontory of Aghunalashka lie four islands: the first, Akutan, is about half as big as Umnak; a verst further is the small island Akun; a little beyond is Akunok; and lastly Kigalga, which is the smallest of these four, and stretches with Akun and Akunok almost from N. to S. Kigalga is situated about the 61st degree of latitude. About 100 versts from thence lies an island called Unimak*, upon which Captain Krenitzin wintered; and beyond it the inhabitants said there was a large tract of country called Alashka, of which they did not know the boundaries.

[...]

* Krenitzin wintered at Alaxa, and not at Unimak.

And the spelling Alaska is in place by 1784, when James Cook and James King’s A Voyage to the Pacific Ocean is published. It appears in a section penned by King in October 1779, after Cook’s death:

It is here to be observed, that the most considerable and valuable part of the fur-trade is carried on with the islands that lie between Kamtschatka and America. These were first discovered by Beering, in 1741, and being found to abound with sea-otters, the Russian merchants became exceedingly eager in searching for the other islands seen by that navigator, to the South East of Kamtschatka, called, in Muller's Map, the Islands of Seduction, St. Abraham, &c. In these expeditions they fell in with three groups of islands. The first about fifteen degrees to the East of Kamtschatka, in 53° North latitude; the second about twelve degrees to the Eastward of the former; and the third, Oonalashka, and the islands in its neighbourhood. These trading adventurers advanced also as far East as Shumagin's Islands (so called by Beering), the largest of which is named Kodiak. But here, as well as on the continent at Alaska, they met with so warm a reception in their attempts to compel the payment of a tribute, that they never afterward ventured so far. However they conquered and made tributary the three groups before mentioned.

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Sources:

Cook, James and James King. A Voyage to the Pacific Ocean, vol. 3. London: G. Nicol and T. Cadell, 1784, 371–72. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Coxe, William. Account of the Russian Discoveries Between Asia and America. London: J. Nichols for T. Cadell, 1780, 166–67. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Everett-Heath, John. Concise Oxford Dictionary of World Place Names, sixth ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2020. Oxfordreference.com.

“Kamchatka.” Encyclopædia Britannica, second edition, vol. 6. Edinburgh: J. Balfour, et al. 1778, 4017. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, December 2020, s.v. Alaskian, adj.; July 2020, s.v. Alaska, n.; September 2019, s.v. Alaskan, adj. and n.

von Stæhlin, Jakob. “Map of the New Northern Archipelago Discovered by the Russians in the Seas of Kamtschatka and Anadir.” An Account of the New Northern Archipelago. London: C. Heydinger, 1774, 44–45. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Image credit: Alaska State Library, Historical Collections. Public domain image as a mechanical reproduction of a work created before 1925.

Georgia

15 February 2022

Detail of the c.1450 Fra Mauro map of the world showing the country of Georgia

Georgia is both the name of a country in the Caucasus and of a US state, but the two names have, unsurprisingly, very different origins.

The country of Georgia, once part of the Soviet Union, is a place name of uncertain meaning that can be traced back to the ninth century Arabic Jurzan. The Arabic word may be borrowed from the Persian place name Gurj, although that name isn’t attested until later. The name passed into Latin, and thence into French, where it was borrowed into English. The Georgian name is Sakartvelo (land of the Kartvellians). The Greeks called it Colchis and the Romans Iberia—not to be confused with the Iberia that is Spain and Portugal—after the Kingdom of Iberia (c.302 BCE–580 CE). The country is often associated with St. George, although that association is entirely mythical.

The name appears in English by the early fifteenth century, when it appears in the Book of John Mandeville, a fictional account of the travels of an English knight:

And ther beth other men that beth called Georgenes, which Seynt George converted, and they doth more worship to seyntes of Hevene than other men doth.

The US state, on the other hand, is named after the English King George II.

At the time of contact with Europeans, what is now the state of Georgia was inhabited by a number of Indigenous peoples. In the north were the Cherokee; in the central region the Muskogee (Creek), Hitchiti, Oconee, and Miccosukee peoples; the Guale and Yamasee along the Atlantic coast; and the Apalachee and Timucua in the south. Most of the Indigenous people were driven off their land and out of the state, although some remain to this day. There are no federally recognized tribes in Georgia today, but the state recognizes the Cherokee Indians of Georgia, the Georgia Tribe of Eastern Cherokee, and the Lower Muscogee Creek Tribe. These peoples, of course, had a variety of names for the land they lived on.

James Oglethorpe obtained a charter in 1732, to establish a colony in what was at the time part of the colony of Carolina. Oglethorpe wanted to establish the colony as an alternative to debtor’s prison for the destitute of England. But given diseases such as yellow fever and wars with the Indians and the Spanish, it would turn out to be not much of an alternative.

Oglethorpe’s charter reads, in part:

All which lands, countries, territories and premises, hereby granted or mentioned, and intended to be granted, we do by these presents, make, erect and create one independent and separate province, by the name of Georgia, by which name we will, the same henceforth be called.

Georgia became a royal, as opposed to a proprietary, colony in 1752. In 1788 it became the fourth state to ratify the US Constitution.

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Sources:

Everett-Heath, John. Concise Oxford Dictionary of World Place Names, sixth ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2020. Oxfordreference.com.

Kohanski, Tamarah and C. David Benson, eds. The Book of John Mandeville. TEAMS Middle English Text Series. Kalamazoo, Michigan: Medieval Institute Publications, 2007. British Library MS Royal 17 C.xxxviii.

Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. Georgienes, n.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2012, s.v Georgian, n.1 and adj.1, Georgian, n.2 and adj. 2.

Thorpe, Francis Newton, ed. “Charter of Georgia—1732.” The Federal and State Constitutions, Colonial Charters, and Other Organic Laws of the States, Territories, and Colonies Now or Heretofore Forming the United States of America, vol. 2 of 6. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1909. 771. HathiTrust Digital Library.

Image credit: Fra Mauro, c.1450. Public domain image.

Huron

Satellite image of Lake Huron

14 February 2022

Huron is an English and French name for the people of the Wyandot, or Wendat, Confederacy. The name was later transferred to the Great Lake. At the time of European contact, the Wyandot dwelled to the east of Georgian Bay, a large bay of Lake Huron. The people now primarily live in Quebec and Oklahoma.

The most common etymology given for Huron is that it comes from the French huron, meaning an uncultured person, ruffian, perhaps from hure (rough head of hair) + -on (diminutive or pejorative suffix). This explanation holds the term was applied by the French to the Wyandot people, and the evidence for this etymology rests chiefly in an account by Jérôme Lalemant, a Jesuit missionary to the Wyandot, sent to his superior Paul le Jeune on 7 June 1639:

Arriuez qu’il furent aux François, quelque Matelot ou Soldat voyant pour la premiere fois cette sorte de barbares, dont les vns portoient les cheueux sillõnez; en sorte que sur le milieu de la teste paroissoit vne raye de cheueux large d’vn ou deux doigts, puis de part & d’autre autãt de razé; en ensuite vn autre raye de cheueux & d'autres qui auoient vn costé de la teste tout razé, & l’autre garny de cheueux pendants iusques sur l’espaule, cette façon de cheueux luy semblant des hures, cela le porta à appeller ces barbares Hurons: & c’est le nom qui depuis leur est demeuré. Quelques-vns le rapportent à quelque autre semblable source, mais ce que nous en venons de dire semble le plus asseuré.

(Arriving at the French settlement, some Sailor or Soldier seeing for the first time this kind of barbarians, some of who wore their hair in ridges,—a ridge of hair one or two fingers wide appearing upon the middle of their heads, and on either side the same amount being shaved off, then another ridge of hair; others having one side of the head shaved clean, and the other side adorned with hair hanging to their shoulders,—this fashion of wearing the hair making their heads look to him like those of boars [hures], led him to call these barbarians “Hurons;” and this is the name that has clung to them ever since. Others attribute it to some other, though similar origin; but what we have just related seems the most authentic.)

The account sounds an awful like an attempt to make sense of an unfamiliar name, using French roots to explain an Indigenous name.

A second hypothesis has Huron coming from Irri-ronon (cat nation), an Iroquois name for the Eries, following a French pattern of adding an /h/ before initial vowels. Alternatively, Huron could simply be a variation on the Iroquois ronon (nation). Regardless of the source, like the names of many North American Indigenous peoples, it’s not a name the Wyandot applied to themselves.

Huron appears in English by 1649, when it appears in a linguistic text by Christian Raue:

The unity of the Characters make not divers tongues become one. As wee see in Latine, Italian, Spanish, French, Poland, Hungary, Irish, English, and the Hurones with other people in the West-Indies who since the comming in of the English, Spaniards and French have learnt the Latine Alphabet, and it may be in time all the West Indies will get and make use of the same Character. Yet it cannot bee thought that so great a part of the new World (lying opposite to our three knowne parts of the old, Asia, Africa, and Eurepe,) should not have many different tongues.

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Sources:

Everett-Heath, John. Concise Oxford Dictionary of World Place Names, sixth ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2020. Oxfordreference.com.

Lalemant, Jérôme. “Relation of the Occupations of the Fathers of the Society of Jesus, who are in the Huron Land, a Country of New France” (7 June 1639). Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents: Travels and Explorations of the Jesuit Missionaries in New France, 1610–1791, vol. 16 of 74. Reuben Gold Thwaite, ed. Cleveland, Ohio: Imperial Press, 1898, 228–31. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2019, s.v. Huron, n. and adj., Wyandot, n. and adj.

Raue, Christian. A Discourse of the Oriental Tongues. London: W. Wilson for T. Jackson, 1649, 79. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Vogel, Virgil J. Indian Names in Michigan. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan Press, 1986, 13–14. Google Books.

Photo credit: NASA, 2011. Public domain image.

piccaninny

14 February 2022

A piccaninny is a Black child. The word is offensive, especially when used by white people. Like many slurs, it began as a neutral term, but acquired its offensive connotation as it was used in offensive and condescending contexts. Piccaninny comes to English from a Portuguese-based West Indian creole. In Portuguese, a pequenino is a boy and pequeno means small. Piccaninny was first used in English by enslaved people in Barbados and other West Indian colonies, presumably brought there by Portuguese slavers or from Brazil.

The word appears in Richard Ligon’s 1653 A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados. From a passage about the daily life of enslaved women on the island:

At the time the wife is to be brought a bed, her husband removes his board, (which is his bed) to another room (for many severall divisions they have, in their little houses,) and none above sixe foot square) And leaves his wife to God, and her good fortune, in the room, and upon the board alone, and calls a neighbour to come to her, who gives little help to her deliverie, but when the child is borne, (which she calls her Pickaninnie) she helps to make a little fire nere her feet and that serves instead of Possets, Broaths, and Caudles. In a fortnight, this woman is at worke with her Pickaninny at her back, as merry a soule as any is there: If the overseer be discreet, shee is suffer’d to rest her selfe a little more then ordinary; but if not, shee is compelled to doe as others doe. Times they have of suckling their Children in the fields, and refreshing themselves; and good reason, for they carry burdens on their backs; and yet work too. Some women, whose Pickaninnies are three yeers old, will, as they worke at weeding, which is a stooping worke, suffer the hee Pickaninnie, to sit astride upon their backs, like St. George a horse back; and there spurre his mother with his heeles, and sings and crowes on her backe, clapping his hands, as if he meant to flye; which the mother is so pleas’d with, as shee continues her painfull stooping posture, longer then she would doe, rather than discompose her Joviall Pickaninnie of his pleasure, so glad she is to see him merry. The worke which the women doe, is most of it weeding, a stooping and painfull worke; at noon and night they are call’d home by the ring of a Bell, where they have two hours time for their repast at noone; and at night, they rest from sixe, till sixe a Clock next morning.

Piccaninny could also be used as an adjective for anything small, not necessarily a child, although this use has all but disappeared. From a 1707 description of the lives of enslaved people in the West Indies by Hans Sloane:

They have Saturdays in the Afternoon, and Sundays, with Christmas Holidays, Easter call’d little or Pigganinny, Christmas, and some other great Feasts allow’d them for the Culture of their own Plantations to feed themselves from Potatos, Yams, and Plantanes, &c. which they Plant in Ground allow’d them by their Masters, besides a small Plantain Walk they have by themselves.

By the early 19th century, the term had spread to Australia and New Zealand where it was used to refer to Aboriginal and Maori children. Here’s an example from the Sydney Gazette of 4 January 1817 in an article that references children in a residential school. When the Aborigine chief says the child “will make a good Settler” I don’t think the comment was actually meant in gratitude and pleasure:

The chiefs were then again called together to observe the examination of the children as to their progress in learning, and to the civilized habits of life.—Several of the little ones read, and it was grateful to the bosom of sensibility to trace the degrees of pleasure which the chiefs manifested on this occasion.—Some clapped the children on the head, and one in particular turning around towards the GOVERNOR, with extraordinary emotion, exclaimed “GOVERNOR,—that will make a good Settler—that’s my Pickaninny!”—and some of the females were observed to shed tears of sympathetic affection at seeing the infant and helpless offspring of their deceased so happily sheltered and protected by British benevolence.

Racism knows no bounds.

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Sources:

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2022, s.v. piccaninny, n.

Ligon, Richard. A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados (1653). London: Humphrey Moseley, 1657, 47–48. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2006, s.v. piccaninny n. and adj.

Sloane, Hans. A Voyage to the Islands Madera, Barbados, Nieves, S. Christophers and Jamaica, vol. 1 of 2. London: 1707, lii. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

“Sydney.” Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Observer, 4 January 1817, 2. Trove.

Texas

Replica of the 1690 Mission San Francisco de los Tejas constructed in 1935 by the Civilian Conservation Corps and located in the Mission Tejas State Park. A building in a wooded area, constructed of logs and mortar with a small steeple with a cross mounted on it.

11 February 2022

The name Texas comes from the Caddo word /táyšʔ/ meaning friend, ally. The terminal /s/ in the Spanish and English spelling represents the Spanish plural. The name was applied by the Spanish to the people of the Hasinai Confederacy, a Caddo-speaking nation, when the Spanish founded the Mission San Francisco de los Tejas near what is now Weches, Texas in 1690.

Other indigenous people who dwelled in what is now Texas prior to European contact included the Alabama, Apache, Atakapan, Bidai, Aranama, Comanche, Choctaw, Coushatta, Jumano, Karankawa, Kickapoo, Kiowa, Tonkawa, and Wichita.

The Spanish began exploring and claiming what is now Texas starting in 1528, but permanent European settlement did not begin until the closing years of the seventeenth century. Mexico, including Texas, gained independence from Spain in 1821. In 1836, Texas seceded from Mexico, and after a brief period of independence became the twenty-eighth state of the United States in 1845.

The earliest use of the name Texas that I have found in an English-language text is in a 1759 translation of Miguel Venegas’s A Natural and Civil History of California. The use here, however, is not yet Anglicized:

It is true, that this was in some measures impeded by two conquests, which the government of Mexico had undertaken with great vigour: the first was the garrison of Panzacola, on the Gulf of Mexico, in the province of Florida [...] The second was that of the province of Los Tezas, lying North of New Mexico, in 95 degrees west longitude, or in 265 eastern longitude, from the same common meridian; and in 38 degrees north latitude. In the first conquest, above a million of dollars was expended in the 1700, only Panzacola might not fall into the hands of other nations. Great advantages were also expected from the conquest of Los Texas, which was carried on without any regard to the expence.

The name is fully Anglicized by the end of the eighteenth century. For example, Texas appears in Jedidiah Morse’s 1797 The American Gazetteer, both on a frontispieces map and in an entry for San Antonio:

ANTONIO, ST. a town in New-Mexico, on the W. side of Rio Bravo River, below St. Gregoria. Also, the name of a town on the river Hondo, which falls into the Gulf of Mexico, N.E. of Rio de Brava; and on the eastern side of the river, S. by W. from Texas.

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Sources:

Bright, William. Native American Placenames of the United States. Norman: U of Oklahoma Press, 2004.

Everett-Heath, John. Concise Oxford Dictionary of World Place Names, sixth ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2020. Oxfordreference.com.

Morse, Jedidiah. The American Gazetteer. Boston: S. Hall, et al. 1797. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Venegas, Miguel. A Natural and Civil History of California, vol. 1 of 2. London: James Rivington and James Fletcher, 1759, 275–76. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Photo credit: Larry D. Moore, 2014. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.