Page:The American Indian.djvu/349

Rh and Kroeber who showed that, as a whole, the languages of California differ in the non-use of reduplication of the noun to indicate plurality, the method of incorporating the pronoun and even the noun into the verb, and in contrast to these, the employment of syntactical cases, a method almost unknown in other parts of the continent. These of themselves suggest that we have here a close parallel to the grouping of political units according to culture, for these linguistically independent stocks still show sufficient traits in common to form a geographical area.

In like manner, the languages of the North Pacific Coast form another area. Though no convenient summary is available for this group of stocks, Sapir has proposed the term Na-dene for the Tlingit, Haida, and Athapascan on the assumption that they have a genetic relation. However this may be, this author shows that they do form a group with some distinctive characters, as the absence of reduplication, the very frequent use of freely compounded stems, modes, and tenses indicated by internal phonetic changes in the verb stem, the somewhat general tendency to loose synthetic structure in forming words, etc. Of the other languages, Tsimshian on the one hand and Wakashan (Kwakiutl-Nootka) and Salish on the other, have some characters in common, as initial reduplication in both nominal and verbal forms, and the use of suffixes in numerals as classifiers of the objects designated. Again, all the above languages have certain phonetic similarities. Thus, while we can not group these languages so readily as those of California, yet we are able to distinguish them with respect to certain characters. Further, they fall into contiguous geographical positions.

In an analogous manner Speck shows that Muskhogean of the lower Mississippi has affinities with its neighbors and recently Swanton reports evidences of grouping among the several small stocks of the Gulf Coast. There is, therefore, a presumption that Caddoan, Iroquoian, Muskhogean, Uchean, etc., all possess certain characters that may be taken as linguistic indices of the region, or culture area 8 (p. 205).