I9I4.] PASSAMAQUODDY LANGUAGE OF MAINE. 93 



pum shells arranged on strings in such a manner, that certain combi- 

 nations suggested certain sentences or ideas to the narrator, who, of 

 course, knew his record by heart and was merely aided by the asso- 

 ciation of the shell combinations in his mind with incidents of the 

 tale, song or ceremony which he was rendering (Prince, Proc. Amer. 

 Pliilos. Society, December 3, 1897, pp. 479-495). With Selmo, how- 

 ever, died the secret of this curious system, but the laws and customs 

 thereby recorded have been preserved and published in the Proceed- 

 ings of the American Philosophical Society (loc. cit.). There is also 

 a large amount of oral literature handed down by these Indians, a 

 quantity of which exists in the manuscripts of the Hon. Lewis 

 Mitchell, Indian member of the Maine Legislature. These docu- 

 ments are now in my possession and I expect to publish their material 

 in an exhaustive work on the Passamaquoddy tribe and language. 

 Some matter of this character has already appeared, both in the Pro- 

 ceedings of this Society (XXXVIII., pp. 181-189), and also in 

 Leland and Prince, " Kuloskap the Master," New York, 1902, a pop- 

 ular exposition of the eastern Algonquin folk-lore. 



The object of the present paper is to discuss briefly the chief 

 peculiarities of the Passamaquoddy idiom, as it is now in use. No 

 detailed presentation of the morphology of this dialect has been made 

 as yet, although some of its features have been noticed. Nearly all 

 the materials for the present article have been gathered orally from 

 the Passamaquoddies and tested by means of the Mitchell manuscripts. 



PHONETICS. 

 The phonetics of the dialect are comparatively simple. The sys- 

 tem followed herein gives to the vowels the Italian pronunciation, 

 except a = English azv in 'awful' and the indeterminate vowel 

 {Schii'und) which is indicated by the apostrophe '. There are no 

 nasal vowels in Passamaquoddy, as in Abenaki. H has the value of 

 the simple breathing, but the inverted comma ' is the well known 

 Algonquin glottal catch, pronounced like a very soft Arabic medial 

 He. Ch often represents a palatal ts^ and between vowels has a 

 tendency to approach j==^dsy. The constants p, t, k are voiceless 

 surds often approaching b, d and hard g between vowels, but never 



