Language
According to William Byrd II, the Saponi spoke the same language as the Siouan Occaneechi and the Steganaki (also known as Stuckenock). It was probably the same as that spoken by the Meipontsky, a minor tribe noted in the record in 1722. By the time linguistic data was recorded, these related eastern Siouan tribes had settled together at Fort Christanna in Brunswick County, Virginia, where the colonists sometimes referred to them as the Christanna Indians. The Tutelo language was fairly well recorded by Horatio Hale. In the 21st century, it is being used by the Occaneechi as the basis for the revival of the Tutelo-Occaneechi language, also called Yésah.
The Saponi dialect is known from only two sources. One is a word list of 46 terms and phrases recorded by John Fontaine at Fort Christanna in 1716. It contains a number of items revealing it to be virtually the same language as recorded by Hale. The other source are a few translated creek names noted by William Byrd II in his History of the Dividing Line betwixt Virginia and North Carolina in 1728. Byrd's scant list also proved to include several names from unrelated Indian tribes.
Read more about this topic: Saponi People
Famous quotes containing the word language:
“Poetry is the universal language which the heart holds with nature and itself. He who has a contempt for poetry, cannot have much respect for himself, or for anything else.”
—William Hazlitt (1778–1830)
“Play for young children is not recreation activity,... It is not leisure-time activity nor escape activity.... Play is thinking time for young children. It is language time. Problem-solving time. It is memory time, planning time, investigating time. It is organization-of-ideas time, when the young child uses his mind and body and his social skills and all his powers in response to the stimuli he has met.”
—James L. Hymes, Jr. (20th century)
“I shall christen this style the Mandarin, since it is beloved by literary pundits, by those who would make the written word as unlike as possible to the spoken one. It is the style of all those writers whose tendency is to make their language convey more than they mean or more than they feel, it is the style of most artists and all humbugs.”
—Cyril Connolly (1903–1974)