Mission Delaware Vocabulary

Beginning in the mid eighteenth century, seven Moravian missionaries recorded extensive works in the Delaware or Lenape language. John Ettwein (1712-1802) was among the earliest. His most significant work is a long manuscript vocabulary of words and short phrases likely collected prior to the Revolutionary War. This manuscript, now kept in the Moravian Archives at Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, preserves some rare lexical gems of the Lenape language that, absent Ettwein's endeavors, would have been lost to posterity. However, it was originally written in German and has never before been published.

Raymond Whritenour has at last made this excellent resource accessible to a modern audience in English. This first ever published edition of A Mission Delaware Vocabulary is a translation of the original manuscript, featuring over 1,300 Lenape words and phrases in both Lenape-English and English-Lenape sections. Using the Lenape entries as a guide, Whritenour has also annotated and corrected Ettwein's translations and provided etymological explanations where appropriate, making this work useful not only to historical researchers but also modern-day students and those interested in language reconstruction.