The earliest specimen of their language under its present name is given
by Johannes de Laet in his _Novus Orbis, seu Descriptio Indiæ
Occidentalis_ (Lugd. Bat. 1633). It was obtained in 1598. In 1738 the
Moravian brethren founded several missionary stations in the country,
but owing to various misfortunes, the last of their posts was given up
in 1808. To them we owe the only valuable monuments of the language in
existence.
Their first instructor was a mulatto boy, who assisted them in
translating into the Arawack a life of Christ. I cannot learn that this
is extant. Between 1748 and 1755 one of the missionaries, Theophilus
Schumann, composed a dictionary, _Deutsch-Arawakisches W[oe]rterbuch_,
and a grammar, _Deutsch-Arawakische Sprachlehre_, which have remained
in manuscript in the library of the Moravian community at Paramaribo.
Schumann died in 1760, and as he was the first to compose such works,
the manuscript dictionary in the possession of Bishop Wullschlägel,
erroneously referred by the late Professor von Martius to the first
decade of the last century, is no doubt a copy of Schumann's.
In 1807 another missionary, C. Quandt, published a _Nachricht von
Surinam_, the appendix to which contains the best published grammatical
notice of the tongue. The author resided in Surinam from 1769 to 1780.
Unquestionably, however, the most complete and accurate information in
existence concerning both the verbal wealth and grammatical structure of
the language, is contained in the manuscripts of the Rev. Theodore
Schultz, now in the library of the AMERICAN PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY. Mr.
Shultz[TN-1] was a Moravian missionary, who was stationed among the
Arawacks from 1790 to 1802, or thereabout. The manuscripts referred to
are a dictionary and a grammar. The former is a quarto volume of 622
pages. The first 535 pages comprise an Arawack-German lexicon, the
remainder is an appendix containing the names of trees, stars, birds,
insects, grasses, minerals, places, and tribes. The grammar,
_Grammattikalische Sätze von der Aruwakkischen Sprache_, is a 12mo
volume of 173 pages, left in an unfinished condition. Besides these he
left at his death a translation of the Acts of the Apostles, which was
published in 1850 by the American Bible Society under the title _Act
Apostelnu_. It is from these hitherto unused sources that I design to
illustrate the character of the language, and study its former
extension.[1]