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Other comments: Tutelo, also known as
Tutelo–Saponi, is a member of the Virginian branch of Siouan languages
that were originally spoken in what is now Virginia and West Virginia in
the United States.
Most Tutelo speakers migrated north to escape warfare. They traveled
through North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and New York. In 1753, the Tutelo
had joined the Iroquois Confederacy under the sponsorship of the Cayuga.
They finally settled in Ontario after the American Revolutionary War at
what is now known as Six Nations of the Grand River First Nation.
Nikonha, the last fluent speaker in Tutelo country, died in 1871 at age
106. The year before, he had managed to impart about 100 words of
vocabulary to the ethnologist Horatio Hale, who had visited him at the
Six Nations Reserve.
Descendants living at Grand River Reserve in Ontario spoke Tutelo well
into the 20th century/ Linguists including Horatio Hale, J. N. B.
Hewitt, James Owen Dorsey, Leo J. Frachtenberg, Edward Sapir, Frank
Speck, and Marianne Mithun recorded the language. The last active
speakers, a mother and daughter, died in a house fire shortly before
Mithun's visit in 1982. The last native speaker, Albert Green, died
sometime after that.
Documentation
Hale published a brief grammar and vocabulary in 1883 and confirmed the
language as Siouan through comparisons with Dakota and Hidatsa. His
excitement was considerable to find an ancient Dakotan language, which
was once widespread among inland tribes in Virginia, to have been
preserved on a predominantly Iroquoian-speaking reserve in Ontario.
Previously, the only recorded information on the language had been a
short list of words and phrases collected by Lieutenant John Fontaine at
Fort Christanna in 1716, and a few assorted terms recorded by colonial
sources, such as John Lederer, Abraham Wood, Hugh Jones, and William
Byrd II.
Hale noted the testimony of colonial historian Robert Beverley, Jr. that
the dialect of the Occaneechi, believed to be related to Tutelo, was
used as a lingua franca by all the tribes in the region regardless of
their first languages, and it was known to the chiefs, "conjurers," and
priests of all tribes. These spiritual practitioners used it in their
ceremonies, just as Roman Catholic priests in Europe and the US used
Latin. Hale's grammar also noted further comparisons to Latin and
Ancient Greek. He remarked on the classical nature of Tutelo's rich
variety of verb tenses available to the speaker, including what he
remarked as an "aorist" perfect verb tense, ending in "-wa".
James Dorsey, another Siouan linguist, collected extensive vocabulary
and grammar samples around the same time as Hale, as did Hewitt a few
years later. Frachtenberg and Sapir both visited the Six Nations Ontario
reserve in the first decade of the 1900s and found that only a few
Cayuga of Tutelo ancestry remembered a handful of Tutelo words. Speck
did much fieldwork to record and preserve their cultural traditions in
the 1930s but found little of the speech remaining. Mithun managed to
collect a handful of terms that were still remembered in 1980.
The language as preserved by these efforts is now believed to have been
mutually intelligible with, if not identical to, the speech of other
Virginia Siouan groups in general, including the Monacan and Manahoac
and Nahyssan confederacies, as well as the subdivisions of Occaneechi,
Saponi, etc.
In 1996, Giulia Oliverio wrote A Grammar and Dictionary of Tutelo as her
dissertation. In 2021 the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered
Languages assisted Tutelo activists in building a Living Dictionary for
Tutelo-Saponi Monacan.
Tutelo
has only recorded traditional numerals from 1 to 10 many years ago. New
data for numbers after ten is required. |