A decade ago I posted about the local place name Norwottuck (“Or something like that”); now I’ve come across what seems to be a knowledgeable discussion in Alice Nash’s “Quanquan’s Mortgage of 1663” in Marla R. Miller (ed.), Cultivating a Past: Essays on the History of Hadley, Massachusetts
Nolwottog is also known in the literature as Norwottock and Nonotuck, with orthographic variations on the three names. The 1653 deed calls the place Nonotuck. This is not a misspelling. The Algonkian languages spoken by indigenous peoples in New England have three major forms, or reflexes. The most obvious difference to the nonspecialist is that one uses n where the others use l or r. John Eliot, the Protestant missionary, wrote, “We in [eastern] Massachusetts pronounce the N; the Nipmuck Indians pronounce L; and the Northern Indians pronounce R.” Similarly, the endings –ogg or –og, –ock, and –uck are all variants of a locative ending, indicating the word refers to a place. When documents were written by Englishmen who knew the land and its people well, such as John Pynchon and the fur traders who worked for him, they wrote Nolwottogg, because that was what they heard. Nonotuck, the n form used in the 1653 deed, is an historical remnant, reflecting a kind of internal colonialism. When Englishmen such as John Pynchon and his father, William, first began to buy inland tracts in the Connecticut River Valley, they often hired the services of Native men from eastern Massachusetts as interpreters and to aid in the negotiations. The earliest interpreter, a Wampanoag man named William Ahhaton, understood the dialect spoken by the people of Nolwottog, but he pronounced their name as Nonotuck. The name was written as Ahhaton pronounced it. Although John Pynchon later recorded the name as Nolwottog, the alternate spelling persists to this day. Ironically, the Nolwottog have been better known by what others called them than by what they called themselves.
We discussed “Wampanoag” in 2005.
I wonder how the Wampanoag revival is going. The kid mentioned as the first native speaker in decades must be 12 or 13 years old now. This article mentions her:
http://capecodlife.com/life/reviving-a-long-lost-language/4/
But it doesn’t say much about her proficiency, or whether any other children have been raised speaking Wampanoag yet.
There might be more at the Wampanoag Revival site. I only followed a link or two:
http://www.wlrp.org
Sadly I do not recall the details of the Wampanoag Incident of 2014; any of you who happen to be AH.com members (…that’s probably only me, but just in case) are invited to check out the linked thread (I’m not currently planning to go there until I have an awful lot more free time).
Oh, man: “In early June, the original Wampanoag thread was revived for some sober, scholarly input from an expert on the subject. Needless to say, this led immediately to more fighting and one more kick so far.” Better you than me!