Page:The American Indian.djvu/345

Rh printing. The report of this committee is essentially a pioneer work on New World phonetics, but no such practical system, however perfect, can take the place of independent phonetic investigation. A beginning has been made by Goddard who introduced the objective mechanical methods of phonetic analysis devised by European students, but as yet the whole subject is before us.

In a very tentative way a few of the characteristics of North American phonetics have been suggested. Perhaps one of the most obvious differences from English, for example, is the small use made of the stress accent. Another peculiarity of American speech is a curious stopping of the breath before or after vowels, the mechanism for which is a closure of the glottis. Some of the native consonants have proved particularly difficult to European recorders. Among these are the stopped consonants, b, d, g, k, p, q, and t, which have many forms, but sometimes seem to stand between sonants and surds. These sounds are usually designated as intermediate stops. Again, there are glottalized forms resulting from a closure of the glottis and a quick release, giving an explosive sound not found in European speech. Yet the present enumeration of such assumed phonetic differences can serve no very good purpose, for until the study of New World phonetics comes into its own, we can not state what characters, if any, are peculiar to it.

In passing, note should be taken of a few pioneer regional surveys. In California, where we find a large number of different native languages, there appears to be a fair degree of phonetic uniformity. For one, the vowels tend to be open rather than closed and are given with a greater breath impulse than in European languages. The intermediate stops, just mentioned, are numerous and there is a strong tendency to use two t's, but on the other hand a single k.

In how far these phonetic traits are limited to California can not be stated, but such phonetic peculiarities as have been reported for the North Pacific Coast peoples suggest some differences; for example, there is a somewhat unique voiceless l found all the way from Alaska to northern California, and