page_title: List of Bergen, New Netherland placename etymologies
section_title: Passaic
hierarchical_section_title: List of Bergen, New Netherland placename etymologies / Passaic
caption_attribution_description: nl:Pauw (vogel) / en:Pavo (genus)
context_page_description: Bergen was a part of the 17th-century Dutch colony of New Netherland, in what is now northeastern New Jersey. Placenames in most cases had their roots in Algonquian Lenape and Dutch.
  At the time of European settlement, the area was largely the territory of the Acquackanonk Raritan, Tappan, and Hackensack Native American tribes. The Munsee lived in the colony's northwestern reaches, the Highlands, while the Wappinger lived to the northeast in the Hudson Valley. The definition of these groups as they are known today is often from the perception of the colonizing Dutch, who tended to call the existing people by the name of a location within their territory, thus creating an exonym. Both the Lenape and Dutch often named a place based on the geography or geology of the natural environment and described a shape, location, feature, quality, or phenomenon.
  The Lenape were without a written language. The Swannikens, or Salt Water People, used the Latin alphabet to write down the words they heard from the Wilden. These approximations were no doubt greatly influenced by Dutch, which was the lingua franca of the multilingual province.
context_section_description: The county, river and city are taken from pahsayèk, pahsaayeek and pasayak, meaning valley or water that flows through the valley. Spellings include: Pawsaick, Pissawack. Contemporary: Pachsa'jeek.
caption: Pavonia, the first settlement by the Europeans took its name from a burgermeester of Amsterdam. Also an investor in Dutch West India Company (WIC), Michael Reyniersz Pauw,  purchased land along the banks of the Hudson in 1630 in order to establish a patroonship. Pavonia is a Latinized version of his surname, based on the word for peacock. The bouweries, plantages, and port that made up the settlement grew into the gemeente of Bergen.
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