TEE MODERN ENGLISH LANGUAGE 16 1 



in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, drew up his classic list 

 of the linguistic families of American Indians north of Mexico, he 

 adopted as a suffix for each stock-name the convenient -an. One of the 

 families thus constituted was the Siouan, embracing all the tribes cog- 

 nate with those already known as Sioux or Dakota, etc. Now Sioux is 

 in English a loan-word from Canadian-French, being really a " reduc- 

 tion " or abbreviation of Nadowessioux, which is found in varying spell- 

 ings in the latter part of the seventeenth and during the eighteenth cen- 

 tury in the writings of travelers, etc., of French nationality or extrac- 

 tion. Nadoivessioux, itself, is a corruption of Natoweisiw, literally, 

 "he is a small rattlesnake" (of the massassauga variety), a term 

 applied, in the sense of "enemy" to Indians of the Siouan stock by 

 their Algonkian neighbors, such as the Crees, Ojibwa, etc. The word 

 Siouan turns out thus to be a very curious hybrid, to the formation 

 of which the Cree-Ojibwa, French and English languages have con- 

 tributed. Natoweisiw is composed of naiowe, " snake," and the com- 

 pound suffix -is-iw, which serves to give the word its special meaning. 

 In Canadian-French the termination was corrupted into -ssioux, since 

 the word was conceived of as a plural and given the sign of the plural 

 in French -x. By and by the word Sioux appears as the representative 

 of the longer term Nadowessioux, and so made its way into English, 

 where also it was regarded as a plural. The word Siouan exemplifies, 

 in a different way from remacadamizing, but quite as interestingly and 

 just as remarkably, the genius of the English language in the evolution 

 of hybrids. This characteristic, like its readiness to adopt foreign 

 terms, is aiding English more and more in its candidacy as a world- 

 language. 



3. Prefix and Suffix. — There exist in the world languages that use 

 prefixes only, others that know only suffixes; and there are also many 

 that employ both these morphological devices. Few, like modern Eng- 

 lish, are free to use the very same particle as both prefix and suffix. 

 And it is one of the complaints of foreigners that expressions of the 

 type of " set up " and " up set " are often very far from being identical 

 in meaning — indeed, may have no kinship in signification whatever. 

 But this fact is a character of strength rather than of weakness, in a 

 language such as ours. We can say: aftermath and day-after; afore- 

 time and pinafore; overalls and allover; overdo and do over; overlooTc 

 and looh over; overpay and pay over; overtake and tahe over; overwork 

 and work over; inset and set in; intake and take in; instep and step in; 

 onset and set on; outlay and layout; outlook and lookout; outworks and 

 work out; hy-gone and passer-by; undergo and go under; understand and 

 stand under; uphold and hold up; upstart and start up, etc. A study 

 of the meanings of the words just cited will demonstrate that English 

 has still a fertile field in this direction. It has been pointed out by the 



