528 Transactions of the Canadian Institute. [V'ol. VII. 



means, " I do not know " in the same dialect. Much stress must be laid 

 on the u of the first word and on the sa of the last, otherwise neither 

 would be understood. 



On the other hand the voice must also be raised with a sort of con- 

 strained effort when one pronounces the words [kkon, fire, nehn , land, 

 tze, gum, etc., though many other monosyllables lack this distinguishing 

 feature. 



In this connection I must not fail to record what, to a student of 

 the Carrier idiom, seems something of an anomaly. In my " Notes on 

 the Western Denes, "^ I wrote some years ago : " In these nouns there is 

 generally one syllable which is more important and cqntains, as it were, 

 the quintessence of the word. Thus it is with the ne of tcene. ... In 

 composite words such syllables only are retained. 



Now it happens that in Nah'ane the accent falls precisely on the 

 first syllable of that word (which means " man " in all the dialects), and 

 not on the second, which is hardly audible when pronounced by a native. 

 In the same way, instead of using only the second half of the word, as is 

 usual with the Carriers and the Chilcotin when they refer to the human 

 body or to any part thereof, as in ne-yceste, human body ; ne-na, human 

 eyes ; ne-fsUtcceti, human neck, etc., a Nah'ane will always utter the 

 whole word, giving particular prominence to its first part, and say, for 

 the same objects, ten'e-ri, tene-ta, tene-kwos, which the careless listener 

 will most probably take for tetiri, tenia, etc. 



Beside their accent, the Nah'ane have, when speaking, a particularly 

 marked intonation. This is so pronounced that it could almost be com- 

 pared to a song. In fact, I have noticed the following modulation as 

 being of very frequent occurrence. Its finale especially is hardly ever 

 omitted. 



I 



W 



^s 



Tu'gu tzen^s' thij'e ecya asqah, 



i.e.. To-day I have become very sick. 



Students of native languages must have noticed that most tribes or 

 portions of tribes have their own peculiar way of singing out, as it were, 

 the sentences of their respective idioms. When there is nothing in their 

 elocution which can be compared to a song, the finale, at least, is almost 

 certain to stray out of the recto tono. So the ending of each Shushwap 

 sentence is infallibly from G to upper C, while the Coast Salish, or at 



