I40 Transactions of the Royal Canadian Institute ivol. x. 



cenna') is the Carrier equivalent not of mother (which is nellu in that 

 language), but of the vocative mamma. 



The foregoing will suffice to point out the danger of such an instru- 

 ment as comparative philology in unskilled hands. 



Nor would it seem that even trained philologists, widely known for 

 their linguistic acumen, would always be equal to the task of properly 

 comparing languages of which they have themselves no speaking know- 

 ledge. This is at least what we are warranted to infer from a paper 

 presented in 1894 to the International Congress of Americanists by the 

 late Dr. Daniel G. Brinton "on the affinities of the Othomi language 

 with Athabaskan dialects". Therein that great anthropologist com- 

 pared eighty-six words, of which he claimed that "fifty-four present 

 considerable similarity in the two stocks, amounting in various instances 

 to identity, twenty-eight show slight similarity, which might be weakened 

 or strengthened by further investigation, and four present no similarity 

 whatever". 



Now I regret to have to state that, after my long years of personal 

 study of five D6n6 dialects, one of which I came to speak more fluently 

 than my own native French, I cannot with the best of will discover any 

 single analogy between the terms Brinton quotes and those of any 

 D6n6 idiom, not even between the Dene and Othomi words for father, 

 which he rightly remarks after Alcide d'Orbigny belong "to the universal 

 terms of human language". For the word ta, which he gives as the 

 D^ne equivalent of father, has that signification in no D6n6 dialect. 

 It rather means Hps, and there is in the eyes of a Dene just as much 

 difference between that word and that for father as there is between it 

 and me, which Brinton claims to be synonymous of mother. 



What the learned doctor had in view was -tha {oetha, or netha), 

 which contains an aspiration (/ plus ha) which utterly differentiates 

 this monosyllable from the non-aspirated ta. 



The trouble with Dr. Brinton is that he took as a basis for his com- 

 parisons would-be D6ne terms derived from a book by a German named 

 J. C. E. Buschmann, which was published as early as 1856. Wherever 

 that author may have taken his material I do not profess to know. 

 D6n6 words, even when disfigured by the lack of the clicks and aspira- 

 tions proper to the language, are easily recognizable as such, whether 

 they be published by Drs. Matthews, Goddard, Sapir, or any of the 

 northern missionaries. As to Buschmann 's material, it is all Chinese to 

 me. I do not understand a word of it. 



Dr. Brinton was all the more unfortunate in his choice as he then 

 had at his disposal my own vocabulary of D^n6 roots which had appeared 



