Page:American Anthropologist NS vol. 1.djvu/426

 ANTHROPOLOGIC LITERATURE

Die Sprache der Zimshian-Indianer in Nordwest- America. Von Dr A.C.Graf von der Schulenburg. Braunschweig: 1894. 4, 372 pp.

Dr von der Schulenburg has undertaken the laborious task of com- piling a grammar of the Zimshlan (Tsimshian) language from the translation of the Gospel made by Bishop Ridley. Anyone who has undertaken to study a language from material of this character will appreciate the labor involved in the task and the numerous sources of error that obscure the structure of the language. The translations, which are generally, as in this case, made with the assistance of some- what educated natives, are never free from error, and often are incon- sistent in the phonetic rendering or morphological interpretation of grammatical phenomena. It requires, therefore, an extraordinary degree of judgment and of caution to reach satisfactory results. While the present work bears all the marks of most painstaking indus- try, the author has not succeeded in overcoming the difficulties of grammatic interpretation. He has left his analysis so incomplete that the characteristic features of the structure of the language do not appear with sufficient clearness.

A discussion of the morphology of the language would require first of all, an explanation of the fundamental morphological processes — reduplication, and word formation by means of prefixes and suffixes. The tendency to form words by means of prefixes is one of the most characteristic features of Tsimshian. Dr von der Schulenburg, un- fortunately, has been misled by the 'lack of consistency in printing, prefixes often being represented as parts of words, often as independent words. He has accordingly treated the same subject in one place as a dependent prefix, in another as an independent word, thus creating a great deal of confusion in the simple structure of the language. Neither has he made an analysis of the functions of prefixes. It would seem that we may distinguish nominal and verbal prefixes. Purely nominal prefixes are either locative or adjective ; or they transform verbs into nouns, such as prefixes for the nomen actoris, etc. Purely verbal prefixes are either prepositional or adverbial ; or they transform nouns into verbs. One of the most striking features in the use of these
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