1891-92}. DENE ROOTS. 149 
we have amassed and impartially collated reliable data, as Abel Re- 
musat accuses some writers of doing,* I take the liberty of laying before 
the scientific world the following list of roots extracted from the vocabu- 
lary of a dozen or more Déné tribes. May I be permitted to respect- 
fully request lovers of philological and ethnological lore to ‘examine them 
_ patiently, and most earnestly beg of those who are in a position to do so, 
to carefully compare them with terms of Asiatic languages, more especi- 
ally with those of the Turanian stock? Should any Déné words be 
found to have sufficient phonetic similarity to synonymous terms from 
heterogeneous tongues to allow of ethnological argument, I would consider 
it a very great favor if the discoverer of such affinities were pleased to 
send met or the Canadian Institute the result of his researches. 
I am well aware that terminology is not of itself what entirely consti- 
tutes a language. We must reckon also with its grammar and syntax 
But, in the first place, I have already given an outline of the grammatical 
aspect of the Déné idioms which my kind co-operators might consult 
perhaps to advantage. Then we should not lose sight of the following 
words of a great authority on the subject: “ It appears that nothing 
whatever could be inferred with respect to the relations of two languages 
from the coincidence of the sense of any single word in both of them, 
and that the odds would be three to one against the agreement of two 
words; but if three words appear to be identical, it would be then 
more than ten to one that they must be derived in both cases from some 
parent language or introduced in some other manner. Six words would 
give more than 1,700 chances to one, and eight almost 100,000 chances ; 
so that in these cases the evidence would be little short of absolute 
certainty.”§ Moreover, some instances seem to warrant us in maintain- 
ing that under the pressure of peculiar influences a language may 
undergo such alterations as that its words shall belong to one class and 
its grammar to another. In other words, though the grammatical 
structure of the Déné dialects differs from that of other idioms wherewith 
they are terminologically co-affin, it would not follow that the relations 
to the latter would be philologically worthless. 
This being premised, I shall now proceed to offer a few remarks to 
facilitate the intelligence of the following vocabulary and bring out into 
* << Tci comme ailleurs, on a commence par batir des systémes au lieu de se borner a 
Vobservation des faits.”” Recherches sur les Langues Tartares, Paris, 1820, p. xviii. 
+ Stuart’s Laie Mission, vZa Ashcroft and Quesnelle, British Columbia. 
= Transactions Canadian Institute Vol. 1., Part 11., 1891, p. 170. 
§ Alex. von Humboldt, ap. Klaproth, Asia polyglotta, p. vi. 
