52 2 . michelson: fox Indians 



it will be seen that they are strictly only proper when a break 

 in sense occurs. Unfortunately it was not possible to teach 

 informants to dictate the words this way. It depended on the 

 length of words as to whether I could take more than one at a 

 time; and in this way the resulting texts contain mixed sentence- 

 phonetics. The choice therefore remains of printing texts with 

 these inconsistencies or making the phonetics uniform. It 

 seems correct to do the latter so far as sentence-phonetics are 

 concerned. In this normalization I have chosen the full-sound- 

 ing terminal vowels before initial consonants, save where the 

 sense indicates a pause; before initial vowels and diphthongs 

 terminal voiceless aspirated vowels are eliminated. In this 

 matter I have been guided not only by the fact that in this way 

 a truer picture of the language is presented, but also because 

 in so doing comphcated symbols are avoided: thus -m"*"^' is 

 eliminated in favor of -wa and -w, and so on. The elimination 

 of terminal voiceless aspirated vowels before initial vowels and 

 diphthongs is to a certain extent at least a question of tempo; 

 in actual Fox speech I have heard them even as full-sounding 

 in this position. The texts accordingly represent allegro tempo. 

 Even final full-sounding vowels are aspirated before an initial 

 sibilant. Another point may properly be brought up. Within 

 verbal complexes the elision of final i of one morphological 

 element before another such element beginning with a vowel or 

 diphthong, especially in "loose composition," is to a certain ex- 

 tent a matter of allegro or lento tempo. I have followed the 

 usage of the reciter of the texts. It may be noted that in the 

 current syllabary the Foxes are not consistent in writing or 

 omitting such a vowel; yet in "loose composition" the vowel 

 is written for the most part, and elided in intimate compounds. 

 It should be remarked that the Meskwakis themselves in 

 such cases very frequently separate the elements by periods. 

 The principal word accent is indicated by the acute ('). Fol- 

 lowing the recommendations of the committee of the American 

 Anthropological Association^ I have employed the symbols and 



^Phonetic transcription of Indian Languages, Smiths. Misc. Coll. 66, No. 6: i. 



