1889-9''. THE d:6ne languages. 171 



ago before the American Association for the Advancement of Science, 

 the fundamental proposition of which is that " the only satisfactory evi- 

 dence of affiliation or direct relationship of two communities, apart from 

 authentic historical records, is their speech."* 



Well might that multifariously-gifted philosopher Leibnitz deplore the 

 carelessness of the explorers of his time, who did not think it worth their 

 while to collect vocabularies of the languages spoken by the nations 

 they pretended to make known to the civilized world. " C'est un grand 

 ddfaut," he says, " que ceux qui font des descriptions de pays et des re- 

 lations de voyages oublient d'ajouter des essais des langues des peuples, 

 of car cela servirait pour en faire connaitre les origines.""f* This reproach 

 the German philosopher, though addressed to travellers in foreign lands, 

 might be construed as applying with even a greater degree of force to 

 those who, like the missionaries, are by the nature itself of their avoca- 

 tion bound to reside among the natives of the countries they evangelize. 

 Not to deserve it, I, for one, shall attempt to unfold to the appreciation of 

 the indulgent philologist the beauties of the languages spoken by a family 

 of American aborigines who, if low in the social scale, still possess in 

 their native dialects vehicles for thought more expressive, and, in their 

 own way, richer than that of many civilized nations. I mean the lan- 

 guages of the Den^ Indians, of whom I have given a sociological outline 

 in a late fasciculus of the " Proceedings" of the Canadian Institute.j 



For the benefit of those who may not have read it, let me state that by 

 Dends I mean that large family of Indians more commonly known under 

 the inappropriate§ names of Tinn^, Tinneh, or Athabaskan. It extends 

 west of the Rockies from the 51° latitude north and east of that 

 range of mountains from the Southern Branch of the Saskatchewan 

 to the territory of the Esquimaux. Apart from the Nabajoes of New 

 Mexico, who are ethnologically connected therewith, it is divided into a 

 dozen or more tribes speaking as many dialects. 



For the sake of briefness, all the aboriginal terms unavoidably used in 

 the course of this monograph shall be, unless otherwise noted, in the 

 dialect of the Carriers, the most important of the Western tribes. I 

 shall also, to facilitate the intelligence of some of my remarks, occasion- 

 ally point out the relations of these idioms to the principal other linguistic 

 groups, especially the classical tongues. 



*Am. Antiquarian, IV., Nos. i and 2. 



tLeibnitz, Monunienta varia inedita, ex Miiscco J Feller, torn. IX., p. 595, Jena 1717. 



J Proceedings of the Canadian Institute, Octob. 1889, p. 109 and seq. 



§See " Tlie Western D^nc^s " ; Proc. Can. Inst. Oct, 1S89, p. 109, note 2. 



