Textual Notes

¹ V1 and V2 give different variants of the name Jesus. V1 uses Jesu, which is the vocative in German and Greek (the form used in addressing someone). Instances of Jesa are more difficult to account for, though it does show up as Jesha in V3 and as Jescha in another hymn, “Oh P’gāchgănēth Jescha.”ⁱⁱ Perhaps it derives from the Hebrew Joshua. It is nevertheless interesting that throughout the Moravian Mohican hymn corpus, there are multiple variants of the name Jesus and that this usage was never standardized.

² One grammatical error appears in all versions of the hymn. It is in the title “Jesu paschgon kia.” Algonquian languages such as Mohican have a grammatical gender system in which verbs and modifiers must agree with the gender of the noun. Those with knowledge of Latin or German are familiar with the feminine, masculine, and neuter gender distinctions those languages make. It is called grammatical gender as its determination is not always semantically obvious, such as the German Mädchen (little girl), which is neuter. Mohican distinguishes between the animate and inanimate genders. Though Mohican animacy assignment is often based in semantics (people are animate, rocks are inanimate), the border between the two can be fuzzy: ãamhãan (spoon) is animate but txeekun (knife) is inanimate. The pronoun for “one” in Mohican, as in “I saw that one yesterday,” must show agreement for gender: paashkow for animate, and paashkwon for inanimate. The title “Jesu paschgon kia” incorrectly uses the inanimate pronoun paashkwon, leading to an interpretation such as “Jesus you are the one thing” instead of “Jesus you are the one person.” It is noteworthy that this fairly elementary mistake was never corrected in any of the other versions. One wonders whether the mistake occurred because the translator was unfamiliar with Mohican grammar, the title line was translated by someone else and simply kept, or the translator misunderstood the intent of the German original.

³ In Mohican and other Algonquian languages, body parts must be possessed—that is, they require a possessive pronominal prefix to indicate to whom the body part belongs. In this second line of the hymn, the words “I give you my heart” indicate that the heart belongs to the singer—i.e., is first-person singular “my.” V1, V4, and V6 have ndah, “my heart,” where the n- prefix indicates “my.” V2, V3, and V5 instead use otah, “his or her heart,” with the third-person o- prefix. The latter does not make sense grammatically or semantically: “I give you his/her heart.” Clearly, this is a mistake that no native speaker would make and perhaps originates in some word list where the word “heart” was given as otah with no indication of the possessor inherent to the Mohican word.

⁴ Here is the first case where there are two totally different variants of a complete line. The V1 form is gahana gmachenochganap, “You truly paid much for it.” This line is noteworthy for the appearance of the relatively uncommon preterite tense form -naap. The preterite is used when the effect or relevance of a past event lies in the past rather than in the present.ⁱⁱⁱ Use of this tense suggests, again, a native-level of linguistic competency. In V2 the line is Awãn gia tattawãn ‘?Someone you buy it.’ The first issue with this line is the appearance of uwaan, “someone, who,” which does not make much sense in the context, though it may be that I have misinterpreted this. Second, the phrasing kiya ktutãawa, “you, you buy it,” is somewhat clumsy: kiya as a separate pronoun is unnecessary in Mohican, and ktutãawa, “you buy it,” is not nearly as elegant as V1’s kmuxnohkaanaap, “you paid much for it.” That these lines are so different in form and quality implies that V1 and V2 were composed by different people. That said, whichever author was the second one to make the translation had probably read or heard the first author’s work sung (as shown in the maintenance of the erroneous title); the second writer was not simply making a copy. V4 continues from V1, and V3, V5, and V6 come from V2.

⁵ The Mohican word the Moravians use for “wound” is pkwaaye-, literally “it is a hole.” When this word is referring to a noun, e.g. “that which is a hole,” it can take a number of forms depending on number (singular or plural) and the possessor. V1 and V4 use paapkwaayeyun, “your wounds” (you-possessor, plural wounds). V2 and V3 use kiya paakwaayek, “you wound” (the extraneous pronoun kiya is functioning as the possessor, singular wound). V5 introduces its own form kia Anepaquaik: the word is still singular and has the pronoun kiya, but the word for wound has an addition to the stem, aan-, which appears to lend the meaning of a “certain kind of hole.” This is the first indication that the writer of V5 is not only copying from V2 but adding their own content as well. V6 carries on from V5 here with Anepaquaick. Again, there are two main streams here. V1 is more fluent as it uses inflection to indicate number and possessor. It also talks about how Jesus has paid for the author’s heart with “your many wounds.” V2 falls back on the use of the separate pronoun kiya to indicate possession, which is grammatically more in line with a language such as German than with Mohican. V2 has a subtle difference in meaning: the heart was bought with but one wound.

⁶ Among the variants of the hymn, there are two forms for “forgive me”: osãatumuweh and ahkwãatumoom. The first is an imperative that can be analyzed as “forgive me about it!” The second is literally “stop saying/thinking it about me”—a cognate appears in Wampanoag: ahquoantam.^iv Of particular interest is that the latter has what seems to be the suffix –ooma, which is the delayed imperative, meaning that the request for forgiveness is not to be acted upon right now but at some later date. V2 and V3 have ahkwãatumoom; V1, V4, and V5 use osãatumuweh. The composer of V5 (and consequently V6), though mostly adhering to V2, chose the term for forgiveness from V1, perhaps indicating that this author was working from both documents and merging the two together.

Footnotes