Massachusett writing systems

At the time Europeans colonized the region, Massachusett was the primary language of several peoples of New England, including the Massachusett in the area roughly corresponding to Boston, Massachusetts, including much of the Metrowest and South Shore areas just to the west and south of the city; the Wampanoag, who still inhabit Cape Cod and the Islands, most of Plymouth and Bristol counties and south-eastern Rhode Island, including some of the small islands in Narragansett Bay; the Nauset, who may have rather been an isolated Wampanoag sub-group, inhabited the extreme ends of Cape Cod; the Coweset of northern Rhode Island; and the Pawtucket which covered most of northeastern Massachusetts and the lower tributaries of the Merrimack River and coast of New Hampshire, and the extreme southernmost point of Maine.

The language faded as Indians faced increasing dispossession and assimilation pressures, with the last speakers dying off at the tail end of the nineteenth century.

In her master's thesis, completed in 2000, Baird introduced a modernized orthography based on the colonial system but with a one-to-one correlation between sound and spelling.

[3][needs update] Prior to the introduction of literacy by the missionary Eliot, the Massachusett-speaking peoples were mainly an orally transmitted culture, with social taboos, mores, customs, legends, history, knowledge and traditions passed from the elders to the next generation through song, stories and discussion.

Martha's Vineyard Sign Language went extinct at the beginning of the twentieth century, but many of its users were influential in the development of ASL.

These symbols carved into trees and logs served as boundary markers between tribes, to thank local spirits in the wake of a successful hunt and to record one's whereabouts.

Moravian missionaries in the mid-eighteenth century noted that the Lenape of Pennsylvania and New Jersey would carve animals and etchings onto trees when they camped, and were able to pinpoint the tribe, region or village of symbols that they encountered.

Evidence for dendroglyphic picture writing in southern New England is lacking, as most of the trees were felled by the Federal Period, with current forests consisting of secondary growth after farms were abandoned for land in the Great Plains in the end of the nineteenth century.

[5] The markings may have been similar to the wiigwaasabak of Anishinaabe (Ojibwe) culture in scope and usage, able to record mnemonically songs related to ritual traditions, meetings between clans, maps and tribal identity.

Most depictions include carved hands, the sun, the moon in various phases, people or spirits, anthropomorphic beings, various native animals, markings similar to the letters 'E,' 'M,' 'X,' and 'I,' slashes and crosses, circles that may represent planetary figures, trees, river courses and figures from shamanic tradition like giants, thunderbirds and horned serpents.

For a century after English arrival, the Indians continued to mark rocks and trees, and one site in Massachusetts features a large boulder, with depictions of wetus from as far back as 3000 years old, to depictions of ships shortly after the period of English settlement began, and a few drawings and the Latin letters of the owner's name, where a Wampanoag family was present until the early twentieth century.

[8] As Eliot listened to the Indians from the Praying Town of Natick, he wrote down words according to English orthography, which later developed into the colonial system in use from the 1650s until the mid-nineteenth century.

Only  and Ô are in common use, the other vowels with circumflexes are only rarely attested and generally used where, prescriptively, an acute accent would be used.

It shares the following features: The modern, phonetic system in use by the (Wôpanâak) Language Reclamation Project was first introduced by Baird in her master's thesis, An Introduction to Wampanoag Grammar, which she completed 2000 at MIT.

Pronunciation was pieced together with clues in the early writing, as well as through comparative linguistics work studying sound changes and other patterns of development from Proto-Algonquian and its various descendants.

For example, in Colonial spelling, the word for 'bear' was moſk or moſhk (but also moſhq and moſq), but when any endings, such as the plural or obviative endings are attached, Q was always used, often accompanied by U, e.g., masquog or mosquohwhereas the modern orthography avoids this alteration by using (Q) in all cases, with a simple rule to gleam its proper pronunciation, hence modern (masq) /mask/, 'bear,' (masqash), 'bears' and (masqah) 'bear' (obviative).

[70] (TE) and the letter (TY) produce essentially the same alveo-palatal /tʲ/ sound, although there is a slight difference in their respective origins which is distinguished in the orthography.

Drawing of the engravings on Dighton Rock in the Taunton River, the best known site in Massachusetts. Examples of similar depictions carved into rocks have been found across New England, such as Bellows Falls, Vermont.
Ojibwe wiigwaasabak . Similar dendroglyphs likely were used by the Indians of New England.
Designs such as these were painted or woven into Nipmuc baskets into the 1920s. The lines represent fields, while the domes represent wetus with dots representing people. Arranged in groups, it represents a village and its people.
Top right corner of the first page of Genesis from the 1663 printing of Eliot's translation of the Bible. One can see the diacritics and long s that were in use.
The Old Indian Church and Meetinghouse of the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe. The first literate Indian parishioners used the old colonial orthography, but today, the Mashpee and three other Wampanoag tribes use the modern system developed by the WLRP at the turn of the twenty-first century.