1914] Northwestern Denes and Northeastern Asiatics 139 



of amateurs are dangerous, and I cannot help remembering, in this 

 connection, the extraordinary feat of the late Professor John Campbell, 

 who imagined that he had successfully identified the D6nes of North- 

 west America with the Tungus of Asia, on the strength of words which, 

 to a Dene scholar, were as un-Dene as possible.^ 



The first requisite under such circumstances is a clear concept of 

 what is essential in a word. The comparative philologist must merci- 

 lessly reject those consonances which are mere accidents in the structure 

 of two languages, and none but the student who has mastered several 

 dialects of a language can be regarded as really qualified to properly 

 distinguish the essential from the accidental. 



And then it is so seldom that one meets with a man who is proof against 

 mixing up words, disfiguring them through transcription or ascribing 

 thereto meanings which they never had! 



Take but one instance: while disclaiming any intention of seeing 

 in America anything more than adjuncts from Asia to a population 

 which he probably deems to have been autochthonous, the Norwegian 

 Lewis K. Daa adduced in the Transactions of the Philological Society 

 for 1856 some twenty-two pages filled with what he considered to be 

 terms which have identical structures and meanings in both Asia and 

 America. But some of these would-be assimilations are far from reli- 

 able. 



To speak of only those of which I am qualified to judge, sikkane 

 never meant man in any Dene dialect. It is a corruption by unscholarly 

 fur traders of the compound noun tse-keh-ne, which means: people 

 on the stones, or Rocky Mountains {i.e. Mountaineers). 



That same author gives, p. 265, the word ninastsa as the would-be 

 Tahkali, or Carrier, synonym for mother, while on the next page he 

 would have this to be skaka. Neither term ever meant mother in 

 Carrier. The former is absolutely unknown to that language, while 

 the latter is nothing else than the Babine skhakha, which corresponds 

 to our plural: children. 



According to the same philologist, sak is the Carrier equivalent of 

 the word wife. That term means in that language: alone, apart (Latin 

 seorsum), and forms a part of the adjective sak-oe^ta, which happens 

 to correspond to the opposite of wife, namely single, or virgin. The 

 transcriber of the same had perhaps in mind s'at, which means not wife 

 in general, but my wife. 



The term he gives for girl cekwi is evidently t'sekhwi; but this is 

 synonymous of woman, not of girl, in the same way as his anna (or better 



^ "The Denes of America identified with the Tungus of Asia" {Ibid., Vol. V, p. 167 

 et seq.). See in this connection the latter part of my own essay on "The Use and Abuse 

 of Philology", especially pp. 94-96. 



