What is it about?
Between 1584 and 1585 in London, the English astronomer and mathematician Thomas Harriot learnt the rudiments of Algonquian from Manteo and Wanchese, two Native Americans from Roanoke (in present-day North Carolina). Drawing on these exchanges, Harriot designed phonetic symbols for the ‘Virginian’ language, aiming to create a universal sound-based script. In 1585, Harriot travelled to Roanoke, where he observed Indigenous communities and the natural environment – likely with Manteo’s assistance. His experiences underpinned A Briefe and True Report (1588), the earliest book about the Americas written in English. While this work promoted English colonisation, it also introduced European readers to the knowledge of the so-called Virginia.
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Why is it important?
This chapter positions Harriot’s knowledge of the Americas at the nexus of linguistic curiosity, colonial ambition, and early modern inquiries into natural philosophy. His phonetic alphabet, which applied an algebraic approach to Carolina Algonquian sounds, later appeared on an Irish map. This process embodies deeper connections between knowledge production and colonial discourses in Elizabethan England.
Perspectives
I stumbled upon Harriot’s alphabet in early 2021, during the long, sometimes starry nights of England. A flicker of recognition – flashbacks to my undergraduate classes in phonetics and phonology, the rise and fall of speech waves in spectrograms – cut through the stillness amid the pandemic. Two years later, I stood beneath the dome of the Cambridge Observatory, listening to a friend’s show-and-tell of stars. I realised that the blinking light reaching my eyes had left its source roughly in Harriot’s time.
Dr Weiao Xing
University of Waterloo
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Linguistics and Epistemology in Thomas Harriot’s North Atlantic World, November 2022, Cambridge University Press,
DOI: 10.1017/9781800108257.009.
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