1889-90.] THE DEUt LANGUAGES. 209 



/nc'O, etc.) ,is totally wanting in most Eastern dialects, which likewise lack 

 such synthetically formed comparative as cete-7io\ a'te-tiz, cete-chu, etc 

 Time, or some other cause, has also greatly reduced in the Chippewayan, 

 Hare and Loucheux idioms the number of the modificative forms of the 

 objective, locomotive and instrumentative verbs. The ordinal adjectives, 

 which still exist in Carrier, have equally disappeared with the tribes* 

 migrations eastwards. It is also worthy of remark that the Chif/ohtin — 

 a Western dialect — which has many terminological affinities with the Hare 

 (eastern) dialect, has similarly lost those terms. Nor can I find in the 

 Chippewayan, Slave, Hare or Loucheux vocabularies any trace of the 

 Carrier inflected numeral adjectives, iCowh, nauk, thauh, uatltoh, thmltohy 

 nahceltoh, thahceltoJi, etc., etc. 



Now, in the same manner as the admixture of foreign elements in the 

 Latin-speaking populations of the Roman Empire had for effect to 

 gradually disintegrate, and finally replace, by independent particles, the 

 case-endings of the nouns, and the personal inflections of the verbs, 

 even so it must have been with regard to the inflections and synthetical 

 forms which are now wanting in the speech of the Eastern Denes. On 

 the other hand, since philological researches have taught us that the more 

 synthetical is a language, the stronger are its claims to antiquity, we 

 must conclude from the foregoing that the Carrier is the most ancient, 

 and thereby the purest, of the dialects spoken by the various Den^ 

 tribes. 



This comparative purity, however, should be understood of its gram- 

 matical, or organic, not lexical, features ; for there are not among the 

 Carriers two villages the inhabitants of which speak exactly the same 

 language. Strange to say, these differences bear more especially on the 

 most important part of speech, the verb, its conjugations, and its 'nega- 

 tive elements. Thus, while a Carrier of Stuart's Lake says : an [tc^zcez- 

 Xit>(Es, I do not cough ; a native of Eraser's Lake will say, an chatcesm- 

 fcexiVKs, and a Babine Indian so- hwatcesceki Cxwrns. 



From so important dissimilarities in the actual speech of homogeneous 

 Indians, whose country is contiguous, one might be tempted to infer that 

 their language is not of a very stable character, inasmuch as that of some 

 Eastern Aborigines is represented as wonderfully changeable.* Yet I 

 hardly think it to be the case. I even believe that it can be safely 

 affirmed that the Dene idioms have not varied more during the last 

 hundred years than either English or French ever did during an equal 

 space of time previous to the sixteenth century. 



* Introduct. Study Ind. Lang., 2d Ed., p. 63, text and note. 



