The first New Yorkers

Only a few hun­dred years ago, the only people to live in New York were Native Americans — the Algonquian Indians. They lived in a forest on an island which they calledMannahatta. Then Giovanni da Verrazano, anItalian explorer, discovered New York harbour in 1524 and in 1609 an Englishman, Henry Hudson, found the Hudson River. But it was the Dutch who came to live in New York in 1624. In 1626 a Dutchman called Peter Minuit bought Mannahatta island from the Algonquian Indians for $24! Today, the island is called Manhattan. The Dutch name for their town was New Amsterdam, but in 1664 the English took the town and changed the name to New York after the English town of York.

But people continued to speak Dutch in parts of New York well into the nineteenth cen­tury. Many words in American English came from the Dutch who lived in New York. These include: boss, Yankee, cookie (= biscuit), nitwit (= stupid person) and poppycock (= non­sense). The question How come? (meaning Why?) also comes from a Dutch word, fioekom. The grammar of American English is very simi­lar to British English but the vocabulary is often different. For example, pants is the American English word for trousers, but in British English pants are what you wear under trousers.

From Inspiration by J. Garton-Sprenger and Philip

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