The Gospel According to Matthew
The Acts of the
Apostles
Translated into Potawatomi by Johnston Lykins
Johnston Lykins' translation of the two books of the New Testament was published in 1844. Lykins was a Baptist missionary who worked with a number of American Indian tribes as a schoolteacher, missionary and doctor from 1819 until 1855. He began working with the Potawatomi and learning their language in 1822, and continued his association with them, off and on, until approximately 1852.
The book is written using a unique orthography that was devised by his missionary group. It was designed to make it easy for their Native American students to learn to read, and probably worked for that purpose. It is not as useful for the English-speaking Potawatomi student of today. It is described in Lykins' Explanation, taken from pages 5 and 6 of his book.
Two aspects of Lykins' translation are not mentioned in his explanation. The first is his use of single quotation marks throughout the text. They may represent glottal stops. Two symbols are used, ' and '. Our best guess is that they are identical in meaning and that usage shifted with the printer's supply of typeface. They are reproduced as we found them.
Second, Lykins was frequently driven to transliteration, simply writing down the English as best he could in his orthography since there was no Potawatomi equivalent. Names are the most obvious example of this, but there are others. Two that we have identified are "ce'ptu" (chapter) and "Me'mun" (Mammon, in Matthew 6:24). If you come across others, we'd be glad to hear about them.
The book was typeset from a handwritten manuscript and was not carefully checked. There are variations in spelling of the same word. Some letters were printed upside down; we corrected for this when we found it, but we didn't always notice if an "n" became a "u" by mistake. Spacing is odd in places. We present it warts and all; very few corrections have been made to the original text.
The book was simple in appearance. A picture of an open book on the Potawatomi title page is its only illustration.
You may wish to take a look at more of the text in its original orthography. Its rules for pronouncing Potawatomi are summarized beneath the first seven chapters of Matthew as its first readers saw it, for your reference.
The complete text of the Gospel According to Matthew has been partially converted to BWAKA orthography, in the hope of making the text somewhat more readable. You may find it helpful to read about how we converted the text; the results are summarized beneath the Gospel text, which is presented in Potawatomi and English, side by side, with a summary of the orthography at the bottom.
New!The text of The Acts of the Apostles, also partially converted to BWAKA orthography, is now available.
We hope to do further work with these texts in the future. However, all of the next steps that we have considered are so time consuming that we decided to make this initial work available to you now.
The Library of the Indiana Historical Society in Indianapolis owns one of the few copies of this very rare book, and gave their permission for us to share it with you here. It is available on microfilm through the Interlibrary Loan Program.
Where you can go from here (most are also linked above):
