The Myths of the North American Indians Part 47

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NOTE ON p.r.o.nUNCIATION

Workers in Indian mythology and linguistics have in some instances created a phonology of their own for the several languages in which they wrought. But, generally speaking, the majority of Indian names, both of places and individuals, should be p.r.o.nounced as spelt, the spelling being that of persons used to transcribing native diction and as a rule representing the veritable Indian p.r.o.nunciation of the word.

Among the North American Indians we find languages both harsh and soft.

Harshness produced by a cl.u.s.tering of consonants is peculiar to the north-west coast of America, while the Mississippi basin and California possess languages rich in sonorous sounds. A slurring of terminal syllables is peculiar to many American tongues.

The vocabularies of American languages are by no means scanty, as is often mistakenly supposed, and their grammatical structure is intricate and systematic. The commonest traits in American languages are the vagueness of demarcation between the noun and verb, the use of the intransitive form of the verb for the adjective, and the compound character of independent p.r.o.nouns. A large number of ideas are expressed by means of either affixes or stem-modification. On account of the frequent occurrence of such elements American languages have been cla.s.sed as 'polysynthetic.'