In the same way, many Indian geographical names, after their adoption by Anglo-American colonists, became unmeaning sounds. Their original character was lost by their transfer to a foreign tongue. Nearly all have suffered some mutilation or change of form. In many instances, hardly a trace of true original can be detected in the modern name. Some have been separated from the localities to which they belonged, and assigned to others to which they are etymologically inappropriate. A mountain receives the name of a river; a bay, that of a cape or a peninsula; a tract of land, that of a rock or a waterfall. And so 'Massachusetts' and 'Connecticut' and 'Narragansett' have come to be _proper names_, as truly as 'Boston' and 'Hartford' are in their cis-Atlantic appropriation.
The Indian languages tolerated no such 'mere marks.' Every name _described_ the locality to which it was affixed. The description was sometimes _topographical_; sometimes _historical_, preserving the memory of a battle, a feast, the dwelling-place of a great sachem, or the like; sometimes it indicated one of the _natural products_ of the place, or the _animals_ which resorted to it; occasionally, its _position_ or _direction_ from a place previously known, or from the territory of the nation by which the name was given,--as for example, 'the land on the other side of the river,' 'behind the mountain,' 'the east land,' 'the half-way place,' &c. The same name might be, in fact it very often was, given to more places than one; but these must not be so near together that mistakes or doubts could be occasioned by the repetition. With this precaution, there was no reason why there might not be as many 'Great Rivers,' 'Bends,' 'Forks,' and 'Water-fall places' as there are Washingtons, Franklins, Unions, and Fairplays in the list of American post-offices.
With few exceptions, the structure of these names is simple. Nearly all may be referred to one of three classes:
I. Those formed by the union of two elements, which we will call _adjectival_ and _substantival_;[3] with or without a locative suffix or post-position meaning 'at,' 'in,' 'by,' 'near,' &c.
[Footnote 3: These terms, though not strictly appropriate to Indian synthesis, are sufficiently explicit for the purposes of this paper. They are borrowed from the author of "Words and Places" (the Rev. Isaac Taylor), who has employed them (2d ed., p. 460) as equivalents of Förstemann's "Bestimmungswort" and "Grundwort," (_Die deutschen Ortsnamen._ Nordhausen, 1863, pp. 26-107, 109-174). In Indian names, the "Bestimmungswort" sometimes corresponds to the English adjective--sometimes to a noun substantive--but is more generally an _adverb_.]