Former President Thomas Jefferson’s handwritten letter to Peter S. Du Ponceau, on July 7, 1820, states that a Nottoway Indian vocabulary was obtained on March 4th, 1820 from Edith Turner, styled as their “Queen,” by John Wood, a former Professor of Mathematics at the College of William and Mary.

[3] Du Ponceau recognized the language immediately as Iroquoian, writing that he was "struck as well as astonished at its decided Iroquois Physiognomy.

[6] By comparing words in Wood’s vocabulary with cognates in other Iroquoian languages, Blair Rudes (1981) was able to reconstruct the phonemes of Nottoway.

A comparison to Tuscarora cognates in the rightmost column, however, provides evidence of Wood's intended vowel sound.

Like the vowels, these consonant phonemes were reconstructed by Rudes using John Wood's vocabulary and knowledge of related languages.

[5]: 31  Comparison to related languages (primarily Tuscarora) allowed Rudes to reconstruct some of the consonant phonemes (in bold).

Inalienable nouns, such as body parts, are possessed with the prefix ge- 'my': ge-snunke 'my hand', ge-tunke 'my belly'.

[5]: 37–42  They are as follows: Most of the written Nottoway materials are vocabularies rather than texts, so scholars can only make limited assumptions about the syntactic structure of the language.

Unksawa wokenhuyearUnksawa wokenhu{} year'the new year'Rudes tentatively reconstructs noun incorporation based on these examples: The following vocabulary is from Wood as cited in Rudes from the version Jefferson sent to Du Ponceau.