Indian name of
the place where he was living as _Nimpanickhickanuh_. If he had not
added the information that the name "signifies in English, _The place
of thunder clefts_," and that it was so called "because there was once
a tree there split in pieces by the thunder," it is not likely that
any one in this generation would have discovered its precise
meaning,--though it might have been conjectured that _neimpau_, or
_nimbau_, 'thunder,' made a part of it.

_Quilutamende_ was (Heckewelder tells us[78]) the Delaware name of a
place on the Susquehanna, in Pennsylvania, where, as the Indians say,
"in their wars with the Five Nations, they fell by surprise upon their
enemies. The word or name of this place is therefore, _Where we came
unawares upon them_, &c." Without the tradition, the meaning of the
name would not have been guessed,--or, if guessed, would not have been
confidently accepted.

[Footnote 78: On Indian Names, in _Trans. Am. Philos. Society_, N.S.
iv. 361.]

The difficulty of analyzing such names is greatly increased by the
fact that they come to us in corrupt forms. The same name may be
found, in early records, written in a dozen different ways, and some
three or four of these may admit of as many different translations.
Indian grammatical synthesis was _exact_. Every consonant and every
vowel had its office and its place. Not one could be dropped or
transposed, nor could one be added, without _change of meaning_. Now
most of the Indian local names were first written by men who cared
nothing for their meaning and knew nothing of the languages to which
they belonged. Of the few who had learned to speak one or more of
these languages, no two adopted the same way of writing them, and no
one--John Eliot excepted--appears to have been at all careful to write
the same word twice alike. In the seventeenth century men took
considerable liberties with the spelling of their own surnames and
very large liberty with English polysyllables--especially with local
names. Scribes who contrived to find five or six ways of writing
'Hartford' or 'Wethersfield,' were not likely to preserve uniformity
in their dealings with Indian names. A few letters more or less were
of no great consequence, but, generally, the writers tried to keep on
the safe side, by putting in as many as they could find room for;
prefixing a _c_ to every _k_, doubling every _w_ and _g_, and tacking
on a superfluous final _e_, for good measure.

In some