/Sources of Early Americanisms/--The first genuine Americanisms were undoubtedly words borrowed bodily from the Indian dialects--words, in the main, indicating natural objects that had no counterparts in England. We find /opossum/, for example, in the form of /opasum/, in Captain John Smith's "Map of Virginia" (1612), and, in the form of /apossoun/, in a Virginia document two years older. /Moose/ is almost as old. The word is borrowed from the Algonquin /musa/, and must have become familiar to the Pilgrim Fathers soon after their landing in 1620, for the woods of Massachusetts then swarmed with the huge quadrupeds and there was no English name to designate them. Again, there are /skunk/ (from the Abenaki Indian /seganku/), /hickory/, /squash/, /paw-paw/, /raccoon/, /chinkapin/, /porgy/, /chipmunk/, /pemmican/, /terrapin/, /menhaden/, /catalpa/, /persimmon/ and /cougar/. Of these, /hickory/ and /terrapin/ are to be found in Robert Beverley's "History and Present State of Virginia" (1705), and /squash/, /chinkapin/ and /persimmon/ are in documents of the preceding century. Many of these words, of course, were shortened [Pg041] or otherwise modified on being taken into colonial English. Thus /chinkapin/ was originally /checkinqumin/, and /squash/ appears in early documents as /isquontersquash/, /askutasquash/, /isquonkersquash/ and /squantersquash/. But William Penn, in a letter dated August 16, 1683, used the latter in its present form. Its variations show a familiar effort to bring a new and strange word into harmony with the language--an effort arising from what philologists call the law of Hobson-Jobson. This name was given to it by Col. Henry Yule and A. C. Burnell, compilers of a standard dictionary of Anglo-Indian terms. They found that the British soldiers in India, hearing strange words from the lips of the natives, often converted them into English words of similar sound, though of widely different meaning. Thus the words /Hassan/ and /Hosein/, frequently used by the Mohammedans of the country in their devotions, were turned into /Hobson-Jobson/. The same process is constantly in operation elsewhere. By it the French /route de roi/ has become /Rotten Row/ in English, /écrevisse/ has become /crayfish/, and the English /bowsprit/ has become /beau pré/ (=/beautiful meadow/) in French. The word /pigeon/, in /Pigeon English/, offers another example; it has no connection with the bird, but merely represents a Chinaman's attempt to pronounce the word /business/. No doubt /squash/ originated in the same way. That /woodchuck/ did so is practically certain. Its origin is to be sought, not in /wood/ and /chuck/, but in the Cree word /otchock/, used by the Indians to designate the animal.