Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 8.djvu/259

 RECOLLECTIONS OF AN INDIAN AGENT. 251 The whites are much given to the alteration of Indian names, and generally for the worse, as respects euphonious pronunciation. The word Willamette is a degenerate of our making, for the tribes of that valley and east of the Cascades pronounced it Wa-la-met (the "a" sounded as in father) as though reluctant to shorten a word which stood for so much loveliness, so many beauties that appealed to the eye, so many natural opportunities for satisfying their animal appetites. The late Judge Matthew P. Deady, "a man of scholarly tastes, persistently refused to conform to the Americanizing of the word, and to the last spelt it so as to convey its aboriginal pronunciation. What a pity that the judge did not set himself the task of preserving the Indian names for all the natural objects, mountains, streams, valleys and other striking features of Oregon scenery. Many have been preserved, but we have waked up too late to rescue all the beautiful and musical words from oblivion. The early pioneers to the Northwest Coast had an opportun- ity to learn the pronunciation of Indian names directly from the Indians, but it is doubtful if, with this advantage, we can claim to pronounce them according to aboriginal authority. Our lingual habits are different; our enunciation of the con- sonant elements has a different quality, as is often remarked, we haven't the offensive clucks and gutturals, which we think characteristic of primitive peoples, and yet we have appro- priated thousands of their names and esteem them for theii- vocal richness and variety. In fact, we call them beautiful. But at best we have anglicized them, and occasionally intro- duced an element, the "r," which is foreign to the Indian tongue. No better evidence of this is needed than the vocabu- lary of the Chinook Jargon, compiled and printed here in early times when the Indians and whites were in daily com- munication by the use of it, and yet it is a poor representa- tion of the Indian's speech. Besides a want of critical appre- ciation of the true vocal elements, there is here, as elsewhere in the United States, a tendency to drift into easy pronunci- ation more in conformity with our lingual habits. There are