Gatschet.] 4Jb [May 7, 



mootchiman ear; in Algonkin dialects tawa is ear and therefore Latham is 

 mistaken in comparing Micmac mootooween, Abnaki nootawee {my 

 ear), 

 muddy, mud'ti bad, dirty ; could possibly be the transformed Ottawa and 

 Massach. word matche, Mohican matchit, Odjibwe mudji bad, quoted 

 by Latham. Ashmudyim devil is a derivative of muddy, 

 noduera to hear is probably the Micmac noodak I hear {him). 

 woas-seesh girl is a derivative of woas-sut woman, and therefore affinity 

 with the Naskapi squashish girl through aphaeresis is not probable, 

 sehquow (s'kwa) being woman in that language. In the Micmac, epit 

 is woman, epita-ish girl. 

 The lists which yielded the above Algonkin terms are contained in : A. 

 Gallatin's Synopsis, Archteologia Americana, Vol. ii, (1836); in Collections 

 of Massachusetts Histor. Society, I. series, for 1799, where long vocabularies 

 of Micmac, Mountaineer and Naskapi were published ; in Rev. Silas T. 

 Rand's First Reading Book in the Micmac language, Halifax, 1875, 16mo ; 

 also in Abnaki (Benekee) and Micmac lists sent to me by R. G. Latham 

 and evidently taken with respect to existing Beothuk lists, for in both are 

 mentioned the same special terms, as drawing knife, capelan, Indian cup, 

 deer's horns, ticklas, etc. W. E. Cormack or his attendants probably took 

 all these three vocabularies during the same year. 



In order to obtain a correct and unprejudiced idea of our comparative 

 Beothuk- Algonkin lists, we have to remember that the Red Indians always 

 kept up friendly intercourse and trade with the Naskapi or Mountaineer 

 Indians of Labrador, and that during the first half of the eighteenth cen- 

 tury, when Micmacs had settled upon Newfoundland, they were, according 

 to a passage of Jukes' "Excursions," the friends of the Beothuk also. 

 During that period the Beothuk could therefore adopt Algonkin terms 

 into their language to some extent and such terms we would expect to be 

 chiefly the words for tools, implements and merchandize, since these were 

 the most likely to become articles of intertribal exchange. Thus we find 

 in list No. 1 terms like hammer and ochre, in list No. 2 bread, 7>ioccasin and 

 dog. We are informed that the Beothuk kept no dogs, and when they 

 became acquinted with these animals, they borrowed their name from the 

 tribe in whose possession they saw them first. The term mamoodthuk 

 dog is, however, of the same root as mamishet, mamset alive, which we 

 find again in Micmac,* and it is puzzling that the Beothuk should have had 

 no word of their own for alive. Exactly the same remark maybe applied 

 to wobee white and the suffixes -eesh and -ook, all of which recur in Algon- 

 kin languages. Concerning shebon river, we recall the fact that the Dutch 

 originally had a Germanic word for river, but exchanged it for the French 

 riviere ; also, that the French adopted la crique from the English creek, just 

 as they have formed bebS from English baby. The term for devil could 

 easily be borrowed from an alien people, for deity names travel from land 

 to land as easily as do the religious ideas themselves. The majority of 



* Micmac :-memaje Hive, memaJoo-5kun life. 



