[BURWASH] GIFT TO A NATION 7 
of his life. He was at the maturity of his powers, nearly forty years of 
age. For twelve years he had been in almost continuous touch with 
the Indian language and people, and the work of translation and educa- 
tion. He had brought to this work the aid, not only of a sound scholastic 
training, but also the experience of a successful and gifted teacher. 
And from his commencement of this work he had devoted himself to 
the “attentive investigation” of the problems which it presented. 
Foremost among these problems had been that of reducing the spoken 
language of these tribes to written form. At the solution of this problem 
he had already virtually arrived in a manner satisfactory at least to 
himself. But that solution had not been accepted by the body which 
could make it effective, and he had sought for a partial remedy along 
the Imes already accepted, viz., the use of the Roman alphabet. 
But now a new field was open before him. He was in contact with 
new forms of the Algonquin languages, and with tribes for whom little 
or nothing had been done in the way of reducing their language to a 
literary form, or of teaching them to read and write. Here all the 
familiar problems were repeated on a larger scale, and without the 
disadvantage and prejudice of previous efforts in another direction. 
He fell back on his syllabic alphabet and within two years he was 
proving its complete success. Mr. Evans’ preparation of the syllabic 
writing for the Ojibway language largely solved the problem for the Cree. 
The Cree was regarded by the other tribes as the classic form of their 
speech and the Crees called themselves “the exact people.”’ 
This Cree branch, like the other languages of the Algonquin family 
was largely a language of open syllables linked together in words often 
of great length and equivalent to our phrases or even sentences. The 
roots of the language were essentially the same as those of the Ojibway, 
but modified by the different environment working through lapse of 
time. The scientific genius of the man is again evident in the way 
in which he grasps the phonetic changes and provides for them in his 
modified syllabary. His first point is a change in one of his vowels. 
Instead of the seminasal short u, like u in nun, he finds in the Cree the 
broad a as in father, 7. e., a drop from the seminasal vowel position to 
the true guttural, a change in the position of the organs of speech easily 
verified by any person who will experiment with his own voice. As in 
the Ojibway so here he finds the three mutes, kappa, pi, and tau, but, 
as he says, varying from our English mutes in the exact phonetic ele- 
ment required. Of the semi vowels or liquids, m and n remain as before, 
and he reduces the sibilants to one, which is neither s nor z but a distine- 
tive sibilant. In the Ojibway he has eliminated both y and w as con- 
sonants substituting o for w: now he introduces a y consonant and 
represents w by a point above the corresponding vowel. He has one 
sec. IE TO 2: 
