Language
Linguistic studies indicate that the St. Lawrence Iroquoians probably spoke several distinct dialects of their language, often referred to as Laurentian. It is one of several languages of the Iroquoian language family, which includes Mohawk, Huron-Wyandot and Cherokee. Jacques Cartier made sparse records during his voyage in 1535-1536. He compiled two vocabulary lists totaling about 200 words. The St. Lawrence Iroquoians may have spoken two or more distinct languages in a territory stretching over 600 km, from Lake Ontario to east of Île d'Orléans.
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Famous quotes containing the word language:
“In a language known to us, we have substituted the opacity of the sounds with the transparence of the ideas. But a language we do not know is a closed place in which the one we love can deceive us, making us, locked outside and convulsed in our impotence, incapable of seeing or preventing anything.”
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“Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.”
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“This is of the loon—I do not mean its laugh, but its looning,—is a long-drawn call, as it were, sometimes singularly human to my ear,—hoo-hoo-ooooo, like the hallooing of a man on a very high key, having thrown his voice into his head. I have heard a sound exactly like it when breathing heavily through my own nostrils, half awake at ten at night, suggesting my affinity to the loon; as if its language were but a dialect of my own, after all.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)