John Eliot's Logick Primer: A Bilingual English-Massachusett Logic Textbook

Abstract

In 1672 John Eliot, English Puritan educator and missionary to New England, published The Logick Primer: Some Logical Notions to initiate the INDIANS in the knowledge of the Rule of Reason; and to know how to make use thereof (Eliot 1672) The Logick Primer: Some Logical Notions to Initiate the INDIANS in the Knowledge of the Rule of Reason; and to Know How to Make Use Thereof , Cambridge, MA: Marmaduke Johnson]. This roughly 80 page pamphlet introduces syllogistic vocabulary and reasoning so that syllogisms can be created from Biblical texts. The use of logic for proselytizing purposes is not distinctive: What is distinctive about Eliot's book is that it is bilingual, written in both English and Massachusett (Wôpanâak), an Algonquian language spoken in eastern coastal and southeastern Massachusetts. It is one of the earliest bilingual logic textbooks and it is the first, and perhaps only, textbook in an indigenous American language.

In this paper, we (1) introduce John Eliot and the linguistic context he was working in; (2) introduce the contents of the Logick Primer – vocabulary, inference patterns, and applications; (3) discuss notions of ‘Puritan’ logic that inform this primer; and (4) address the importance of his work in documenting and expanding the Massachusett language and the problems that accompany his colonial approach to this work.

Keywords:

• John Eliot
• syllogistic logic
• Puritanism
• Petrus Ramus
• Wôpanâak

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Jo Edge and Ben Pope who helped me obtain the two articles from the Bulletin of the John Rylands Library and to Andrew Aberdein who alerted me to (Kennedy 1995). Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the CUNY Logic & Metaphysics Workshop, the Nordic Logic Colloquium, the Southern Illinois University Logic Seminar, the Durham Philosophy Seminar, the Philosophical Association of the Philippines World Logic Day, and the Australasian Association for Logic, and I'm grateful to the lively discussions that each of these audiences generated. Finally, I'd like to thank my disability support worker, Dan Hamilton, for his assistance in preparing the manuscript for final submission.

Notes

1 Eliot's basic biographical information can be found in ACAD, A Cambridge Alumni Database, https://venn.lib.cam.ac.uk/, accessed 24 January 2023. Note that (Powicke 1931a) errs in calling the town Hooker's school was in ‘Little Haddo’.

3 His name derives from the Massachusett verb kuhkinneau ‘he interprets’, and the fact that he was from Long Island (Gatschet 1896, p. 217).

3 A new edition of this work was produced by Peter S. Du Ponceau and John Pickering in the early nineteenth century (Eliot 1822).

4 That is, the Pennacook.

5 Eliot (1666, p. 16) identifies three types of composition. The first is ‘made by adding any of these Terminations to the word, yeu$oo$, a$oo$, o$oo$’. This construction is used with nouns, adnouns [i.e. adjectives], and adverbs, and one example he gives is one that shows up in examples in the Primer: mattayeu$oo$utch ‘let it be nay’. The second sort turns ‘animate Adnouns’ into third-person verbs and the third sort turns active verbs into passive verbs.

6 Cf. the thirteenth-century textbooks of William of Sherwood (1966), Peter of Spain (2014), Lambert of Auxerre (2015), and Roger Bacon (2009).

7 By ‘notional pair’ we should understand ‘pairs of [basic/single] notions’ rather than ‘pairs in name only’.

8 At this point we might pause to marvel at Eliot who feels no compunction at introducing these highly technical pieces of logical vocabulary without definition and without even having introduced the concepts or vocabulary necessary to understand them, such as truth.

9 The first, fourfold division, is, of course, the four Aristotelian causes – formal, material, efficient, and final – under slightly different names.

10 ‘But when the Iewes saw the multitudes, they were filled with enuie, and spake against those things which were spoken by Paul, contradicting and blaspheming’, King James Version (1611), emphasis added.

11 In ignoring the so-called Fourth Figure, Eliot is following logical orthodoxy.

12 Eliot's use of ‘syllogism’ to broadly mean ‘type of argument’ is not uncommon for his period, however, so this is less a comment on his terminology and more a heads up to the reader that one shouldn't necessarily think only of Aristotelian combinations of two categorical premises and a categorical conclusion when syllogisms are mentioned.

13 ‘Either make the tree good, and his fruit good; or else make the tree corrupt, and his fruit corrupt: for the tree is known by his fruit’, King James Version (1611).

14 Some attempts to answer some of these questions with respect to the vocabulary necessary to translate the Bible can be found in Silverman (2005, pp. 159–160).