The Origin and Meaning of the Name “Manhattan.

” Ives Goddard

“The systematic study of Eastern Algonquian placenames began with J. Hammond Trumbull,

who made a thorough study of the Massachusett language on the basis of John Eliot’s

seventeenth-century Bible translation and established the comparative study of Algonquian

languages.20 Despite the enduring value of his work, most prominently his posthumously

published Massachusett lexicon, the reliability of his analyses is seriously undercut by the fact

that he worked before the establishment of consistent techniques for analyzing and transcribing

human speech sounds. As a result he lacked a methodology for reliably segmenting and

identifying the meaningful components of words. In addition, he worked before the development

of scientifically based historical linguistics, which would later provide a principled basis for

discriminating between accidental similarities exhibited by related languages and similar (or

dissimilar) features that descend from a shared ancestral proto-language and are accordingly

recognized (to use the terms of art) as corresponding and hence being cognate. Trumbull,

confident in his control of Algonquian grammar, freely coined words from known (or assumed)

components without identifying such words as unattested.” (pp. 284-285).

Source: The Origin and Meaning of the Name “Manhattan”. New York History. Ives Goddard.
anth_Manhattan.pdf (si.edu)