The American Spelling Book
Finding this book among the many felt like discovering a rare gem in a box of costume jewelry, although, truthfully, the analogy is backwards. Noah Webster’s American Spelling Book was the most popular spelling book in the country for nearly a century. When he wrote the introduction to this edition in 1803, Webster claimed it had already sold four million copies. Not rare, but significant. More like a Pez dispenser, then, than a gem; it is valuable because it was common.
Printed in 1824, the book is older than many of the others in my collection. It is not a fancy book. It was made to be used. Its cover boards are wood. They are wrapped in the plain blue paper that gave the American Spelling Book its popular name: “the blue-back speller.”
This copy feels important in other ways, too. It the only book in the collection that I’ve found inscribed by Roxana Newell Johnson Eames. Albert Whiting and John Henry Eames were her sons; she married Willard Russell Eames in 1839. By the time Roxana was turning these pages, girls in New England were going to school at the same rate as boys. The region had achieved near universal literacy by 1840, although this didn’t mean that all girls also learned how to write.
As most of the exercises in the book emphasize, the speller was chiefly a pronunciation guide. Webster’s great innovation in this, the first American spelling book, was to bring spelling into line with American pronunciation. Webster writes:
“In a copious list of names of places, rivers, lakes, mountains, &c. which are introduced into this work, no labor has been spared to exhibit their just orthography and pronunciation, according to the analogies of our language, and the common usages of the country.”
How many times, upon moving to the West, was my pronunciation of Ventura or Ojai corrected? Or, Nevada? Saying these names like a local makes you part of the group. It’s as if two places exist, an inside and an outside. There is an imaginary place called San Fran; and there is a real place, where people live, only ever called SF, the City, or San Francisco. Of course these names change and that’s what Webster was tracing with his ‘just orthography.’ He writes:
“The orthography of Indian names has not, in every instance, been well adjusted by American authors. Many of these names still retain the French orthography, found in the writings of the first discoverers or early travellers; but the practice of writing such words in the French manner ought to be discountenanced. How does an unlettered American know the pronunciation of the names, ouisconsin or ouabasche, in this French dress? Would he suspect the pronunciation to be Wisconsin and Waubosh?”
Webster’s history of habitation only goes so far. He notes the original place names (or the words thought to be place names), but only to appropriate them, like the land that they referred to was appropriated by the people who spoke these words with English or French accents. Webster maintains:
“Our citizens ought not to be thus perplexed with an orthography, to which they are strangers. Nor ought the harsh guttural sounds of the natives to be retained in such words as Shawangunk, and many others. Where popular practice has softened and abridged words of this kind, the change has been made in conformity with the genius of our language, which is accommodated to a civilized people; and the orthography ought to be conformed to the practice of speaking.
“The true pronunciation of the name of a place, is that which prevails in and near the place. — I have always sought for this, but am apprehensive, that, in some instances, my information may not be correct.”
What if, by failing the true pronunciation, that place did not exist for the settlers who colonized Indian land? Indigenous languages were not meant to be spoken by French or English tongues. They were not written in Roman characters. But, that didn’t stop the colonists from creating an orthography and writing these words over squares on a map.
This is the orthography of false justice. These words, whether in their French or English dress, were used to claim lands and remove the people who spoke their true names. The true pronunciation of the name of a place, is that which prevails in and near the place.
The small town of Ashland, where this book was last used, was unceded territory of the Nipmuc people.
English colonizers established a settlement of so-called “praying Indians,” or people who’d been converted to Christianity, in the Ashland area in the seventeenth century. During the resistance movement later called King Philip’s War, many indigenous people were interned on Deer Island, one of the Boston Harbor Islands.
Islands were used for indigenous isolation elsewhere in New England. In Maine, the Penobscot people, whose ancestral homelands once covered more than half the state, were relegated to a reservation that included Indian Island, a small island in the Penobscot River. This was where Frank Siebert, a white linguist, moved to render in “just orthography” the language of Penobscot in the middle of the twentieth century. At the time, after generations of abuse in residential schools, the language was only spoken by two dozen elders on Indian Island in the mid-twentieth century. By writing and publishing a Penobscot dictionary, Siebert laid claim to the language that had been beaten out of its native speakers.
By dint of the same copyright law that allowed Noah Webster to profit from his laying claim to American English, Siebert took legal ownership of Penobscot. For all its rhetoric of freedom, the American Spelling Book exercised command over the land by teaching non-native speakers, the English, a command of the language of native place names.
Signing off, from the unceded ancestral lands of the Ramaytush Ohlone peoples, I leave you with this description, from Native Lands:
“Ramaytush is a linguistic designation for a dialect of the Costanoan language that was spoken by the original peoples of the San Francisco Peninsula. Most descendants of the indigenous groups of the San Francisco Bay Area, however, refer to themselves as Ohlone while a few others use Costanoan.”
The true pronunciation of the name of a place, is that which prevails in and near the place. — I have always sought for this, but am apprehensive, that, in some instances, my information may not be correct.
