This was
fourteen years after the first landing of the pilgrims at Plymouth, and
the same year that John Eliot came over. Its chief claim to notice is
its antiquity. "Some have thought," he says, "that they (the Indians)
might be descendants of the Jews, because some of their words be near
unto the Hebrew; but by the same rule they may conclude them to be some
of the gleanings of all nations, because they have words which sound
after the Greek, Latin, French, and other tongues. Their language is
hard to learn, few of the English being able to speak any of it, or
capable of the right pronunciation, which is the chief grace of their
tongue. They pronounce much after the diphthongs, excluding B and L,
which, in our English tongue, they pronounce with much difficulty, as
most of the Dutch do T and H, calling a lobster, a _nobstan_."
The examples of a vocabulary he gives show them to be Algonquins, and
not "Skroellings," or Esquimaux, as they are represented to have been by
the Scandinavians (vide Ant.
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