1902-3.] The Nah-ane and their Language. 527 



THE DOXOLOGY. 



In Nah'ane. 



S^esdga. CEtha" 'ka'tc^h, CEtcim^* 

 ka'tc6h, Ahtig-e-Ti 'ka'tceh hut'sihkaihtin. 



LhaNn kastseh luda ahih't^ la, tu'gu 

 'ka'tceh, ue't^ 'katc^h, ^t'tha ta'da oetu 

 wotozite a't^h ^ydne 'ka'tceh hu'karo't^ ni. 



In Ts^'k^hne. 



UtqoN CEtha' quh, CEtcwiNh qflh, 

 Y^tqire-Inqi qdh ut'soerhautoez. 



S^ rhass^h tarhit'q^ ille a, qu qflh, 

 awuz'oN quh int'lhoN qi ta uss^ utoetuzit 

 e'tah ^y^toe quh hahut'q^. 



To start with the sounds as such, I will remark that the following 

 desinential letters or groups of letters are never found in Carrier or 

 Chilcotin, but are quite common in Nah'ane : c, ts, tc, tlh, klh, to which 

 we must add the medial -slh-, as in aslhe, I make, and -srh-, as in etisrhuh, 

 I snore. Final ts occurs often enough in Babine, and final tc is as 

 frequent in Tse'kehne, but the other compounds are never found even in 

 those idioms. 



On the other hand the letter m, which sometimes terminates a word 

 in Carrier, never occupies that position in Nah'ane. We should not 

 forget either to notice that the double letter tj or dj, which is so frequent 

 in Kut'chin appears also in Nah'ane to the exclusion of all the other 

 Dene dialects. 



Some Carrier letters have their fixed equivalents in Nah'ane. Thus 

 the Carrier initial n is often replaced by / in Nah'ane. Ex. : ni, mind, 

 Nah'ane,//: na, eye, Nah'ane, ta: aunilh, purposedly, Nah'ane, atilh; 

 dAni, he will say, Nah'ane, diiti. The initial p of many Carrier words 

 becomes m in Nah'ane (as well as in Tse'kehne), and we have/<^«, lake, 

 in Carrier, but men in Nah'ane ; thapa, shore, in Carrier, thama in 

 Nah'ane ; pee-, his, in Carrier and me- in Nahane. 



A Nah'ane sound, which I have found in no other Dene idiom is 

 that which I render by H. It is a kind of a guttural aspiration, much 

 more pronounced than that of the common n. Its equivalent in the 

 other dialects is rh, or the Greek rho, and in the possessive case, it is 

 inflected into a soft r. Ex. : His, pus ; possessive, me-rize, his pus. 



The first particularity which strikes a Dene scholar in his study of 

 the Western Nah'ane, is the presence therein of a regular accent, some- 

 thing quite unknown in all the northern Dene dialects. I have no doubt 

 that the intercourse of that subtribe with the Tlhinket of Fort Wrangell 

 is responsible for that feature of its language. This accent has for effect, 

 not only to lengthen the syllable it affects, but even to raise the pitch of 

 the voice when the accented syllable is pronounced. Thus it often falls 

 on monosyllables. Gun is lUna (a Tlhinket word) in Nah'ane ; kussd 



