A Recent Project

I have been working for the last several weeks (during December, 2018) on an article that presents new editions of four poems in Passamaquoddy, an Eastern Algonquian language of Maine, that were published in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by Charles Godfrey Leland (1824–1903) and John Dyneley Prince (1868–1945), two of the leading figures in their era involved in documenting the traditions of the Native peoples of New England and Maritime Canada. The original texts appeared in Leland’s Algonquin Legends of New England (1884) and Prince’s Passamaquoddy Texts (1921) and several of the latter scholar’s articles. The transcriptions these early linguists employed were quite inaccurate, making it challenging to work out the Passamaquoddy lines of the poems that they had heard. Nonetheless, it appears to be possible to pin down the texts in their entirety. I will be submitting my article that explains the process I have used in recovering them to the journal Anthropological Linguistics in January. A link to this piece will be appearing soon in the Publications section of this page.

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