by John Eliot or Experience
Mayhew--or by the famous interpreter, Thomas Stanton--may safely be
assumed to represent the original combination of sounds more exactly
than the form given it by some town-recorder, ignorant of the Indian
language and who perhaps did not always write or spell his own
correctly.

3. The name should be considered with some reference to the
topographical features of the region to which it belongs. These may
sometimes determine the true meaning when the analysis is doubtful, or
may suggest the meaning which would otherwise have been unsuspected
under the modern form.

4. Remembering that every letter or sound had its value,--if, in the
analysis of a name, it becomes necessary to get rid of a troublesome
consonant or vowel by assuming it to have been introduced 'for the
sake of euphony,'--it is probable that the interpretation so arrived
at is _not_ the right one.

5. The components of every place-name--or to speak more generally, the
elements of every Indian synthesis are _significant roots_, not mere
_fractions of words_ arbitrarily selected for new combinations. There
has been no more prolific source of error in dealings with the
etymology and the grammatical structure of the American languages than
that one-sided view of the truth which was given by Duponceau[93] in
the statement that "one or more syllables of each simple word are
generally chosen and combined together, in one compound locution,
often leaving out the harsh consonants for the sake of euphony,"--and
repeated by Heckewelder,[94] when he wrote, that "in the Delaware and
other American languages, parts or parcels of different words,
sometimes a single sound or letter, are compounded together in an
artificial manner so as to avoid the meeting of harsh or disagreeable
sounds," &c. The "single sound or letter" the "one or more syllables,"
were chosen not as "part or parcel" of a word but because of their
_inherent significance_. The Delaware "_Pilape_, a youth," is
_not_--as Heckewelder and Duponceau represented it to be[95]--"formed
from _pilsit_, chaste, innocent, and _lenape_, a man," but from PIL-
(Mass. _pen-_, Abn. _pir-_,) strange, novel, _unused_ (and hence)
pure,--and -A[N]PE (Mass. _-omp_, Abn. _a[n]be_) a male, _vir_. It is
true that the same roots are found in the two words PIL-_sit_ (a
participle of the verb-adjective _pil-esu_, 'he is pure,') and
_len_-A[N]PE, 'common man:' but the statement that "one or more
sylla