208 TRANSACTIONS OF THK CANADIAN INSTITUTE. [VoL. I. 



the detection of the earliest and purest idiom, and thereby the ethno- 

 logist might find his way clear of many difficulties while attempting to 

 trace the origin and describe the migrations of the tribes that speak them. 

 It is not my intention to enter at present upon such a study ; still I can 

 hardly close a philological paper, embracing in its scope all the dialects 

 of the group without at least some reference to such grammatical and 

 etymological dissimilarities. 



If we must admit as a principle of comparative philology deduced from 

 the formation of the Romance idioms of Southern Europe, that the mu- 

 tations effected in a language through migrations or conquest are always 

 in the direction of greater simplicity, or, in other words, from inflective- 

 ness to analysis, then I think the dialects of the Western Denes must be 

 regarded as more primitive, because more synthetic, than those spoken 

 ty the tribes whose actual territory extends east of the Rockies. To 

 prove this assertion, it might suffice to point to the rules governing the 

 formation of the negative verbs in the dififerent dialects. In Carrier we have 

 a triple — and often quadruple — negation, consisting of an independent 

 ^monosyllable and two or three inflections in the body of the verb. These 

 internal variations are reduced to one — sometimes two — in Chifxohtin, 

 the verb being, as in Carrier, preceded by a negative particle, the co-rela- 

 tive of which is in the Eastern dialects the only particular differentiating 

 the negative from the affirmative. Let us take as an example the verb 

 " I pray." We have in : 



Carrier. CHifxOHXiN. Chippewa yan. 



Affirm. the-na-does-tli ren-tsa-kus-ti yas-thi 



Neg. au-t\\Q-nQ.f-dc£z<£s-t\{ tla-rhn-tsd.-'kuzcEs-ix yas-thi //// 



12 3 1 2 • 1 



So the Chippewayans and all Eastern Denes simply say : I pray not. 

 This is far, indeed, from the doubly — or trebly — inflected negation of the 

 Carriers. 



The Eastern Denes have also lost quite a number of other inflections 

 still existing in the Carrier verbs. Such are, for instance, the dualistic 

 pronominal inflections of the verbs of locomotion, and of the verbs of 

 station corresponding to the three persons of our singular, as well as the 

 two last persons of the indefinite singular of the same verbs. Further- 

 more, the remarkable synthetism which we have already noticed in the 

 comparative forms of the primary verbal adjectives {su-ilcho, ndoelcho, 

 etc.), no less than in their six especial differentiating prefixes {iihi, dhi, 



