1876.] ^1«^ [Gatschet. 



tioual idiom. One of tliem, tlie chemist Oscar Loew, visited in August 



1872 tliat section by order of tlie "Texas Coal and Copper Mining Asso- 

 ciation" for metallurgical and mining purposes, and in subsequent years 

 became a very efficient member of Lieut. Geo. M. Wheeler's Surveying 

 Expeditious west of the 100. Meridian. His field-notes on Texas and the 

 Tonka was have been published in "Petermann's Miltheilungen," Gotha, 



1873 (December). Tlie linguistic materials collected by him and Mr. Fr. 

 von Rupprecht were published in full by me in my recent book: 



" Zw'dlf Sprachen aus dem Sudicesten Noraamerikas, Weimar 1876;" 

 and this article here merely contains the results of a closer investigation, 

 hitherto unpublished, of the Tonka wa words and sentences transmitted to 

 me. 



Tonkawa differs absolutely in its radicals from all surrounding American 

 tongues, and the few terms coinciding seem to have been borrotced from 

 neighboring idioms. Most syllables begin and terminate with consonants, 

 but consonants never preponderate in number so as to obscure the pronun- 

 ciation of the vocalic elements. The consonants composing T. words are 

 as follows: 



Explosives: k, g; t, d; p, b; x; tch. 



Spirants: s, sh, h, v, y (in English: yoke). 



Liquids: n, m, 1, r. 



f does not occur; d and r are scarce, and g very unfrequent. 



Among the vowels i, e, a, o, u (all sounds were given here the Italian 

 pronunciation), a alone is softened into the " Umlaut" a (ekkvan and ekk- 

 van dog) and forms the diphthongs ai and au. No other diphthongs exist but 

 eu, ei, oi; and those formed with y (ya, ye, yo, yu),if we choose to call them 

 diphthongs. As in most of the Northern idioms of America, vowels fre- 

 quently form a hiatus: e-e-ion loeek, esam6-i broom-weed. Combinations 

 of three consonants frequently occur, but they never sound unharmoniously 

 to our ear, and in fact the Tonka was seem to be endowed with a remarkable 

 sense for linguistic euphony. They lack the softer palatal dsh, and all the 

 aspirates but x (or kh): the hard guttural occurring in Welsh, in German 

 ("tracAten") and in Spanish (j in mujer, dcjar); -s at the end of words 

 generally becomes -sh or -tch, and it alternates throughout with sh. A 

 final -n is exceedingly frequent. The mutes often alternate among each 

 other, b with p, g with h, k and x (and t with tch). 



Redoubling the monosyllabic root is a means of grammatical synthesis 

 extensively used for various purposes by all languages known; the T., how- 

 ever, seems to employ it almost only for onomatopoetic purposes, as in: 

 tchatchaya to laugh, ko^^o^ua to breathe, perspire, tchutchuv to be seared. 

 The nature of the material available does not as yet allow to establish gen- 

 eral grammatical laws for the T., but permits a glimpse at its method of 

 compounding words, and gives a few indications of structural import. The 

 system of the object and subject pronouns seems to be rather intricate. 



The negative particle not consists of two parts, ka and pa, which are fre- 

 quently placed one aside of the other, as in Apache, and in Tehua (New- 



