ABSTRACT
Yet his endeavours as a lexicographer and phonetician are hardly known at all to historians of linguistics, although he achieved an astonishing feat for his time-the creation of a phonetic alphabet, intended for universal application, but more particularly for the notation of the Algonkian spoken in the Roanoke area of what is now North Carolina. This seems to have been the earliest attempt to devise such a system for Algonkian, and it is only the fact that the work remained in manuscript, its significance unrecognised until recently, that has prevented Harriot from being acknowledged as a pioneer phonetician, the first English scholar to devise a nonalphabetic attempt to represent the sounds of any language, his own or any other .1 He also recorded a substantial number of North Carolina Algonkian words which were included in the only work which he published, A Briefe and True Report (1588), on which some later English explorers drew for information about the Algonkian vocabulary. The aim of this paper is to draw the attention of linguists to Harriet's pioneering work in the field, and to examine his phonetic script, his contribution to Algonkian lexicography, and his possible influence on some 17th-century successors. The methods adopted by Harriet and his followers in the use of informants will also be briefly considered.
