Indigenous Cosmologies of the Early Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World

• Main Author: Rivett, Sarah
• Format: Book
• Language: unknown
• Published: Oxford University Press 2017
• Subjects: Gravier; Mayhew; abenaki
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190492564.003.0004

Challenges to biblical linguistics made it increasingly difficult to map human diversity. Consequently, early eighteenth-century language philosophers turned to the specificity of place to integrate language and national genealogy. Edward Lhwyd designed a comprehensive study of British languages. I contrast Lhwyd and his philosophical coterie with Joseph-Francois Lafitau’s and Cotton Mather’s attempts to explain to a European audience how the peopling and languages of North America accord with Genesis. Unmoored from the need to fit indigenous words back into a Christian cosmology and somewhat detached from the broader Atlantic network of knowledge exchange, missionary and indigenous philosophers arrived at new insights into North American linguistics. Among the Wampanoag in Plymouth and Martha’s Vineyard, the Abenaki in Maine, and the Miami-Illinois, Experience Mayhew, Josiah Cotton, Sebastian Rale, Jacques Gravier, and Antoine-Robert Le Boullenger compiled massive dictionaries that in some cases remain the most lasting evidence we have of these languages.