1898-99. | THE USE AND ABUSE OF PHILOLOGY. 87 
If we now pass from the articulations considered as sounds to the 
artificial means of expressing them, we notice two kinds of letters of very 
unequal linguistic importance, the consonants and the vowels. In some 
languages, as the Semitic, the former only are used* to express ideas, 
whilst, in the majority of even the other stocks, the importance of the 
vowels is also but secondary. Thus the English “ s¢ove,” is derived from 
the Saxon stan, which is s¢eex in Dutch, s¢tezz in German and s¢em in 
Swedish. “Bean” is a Saxon word the equivalent of which is 007 in 
Dutch, dohne in German and dénva in Swedish. Likewise fsa is the 
Carrier synonym for “beaver,” which becomes ¢se and ¢s? among the 
Loucheux, ¢so with the Rocky Mountain tribes and ¢sw in Alaska. _T’sz 
(with a lingual explosion) means “canoe” in the dialect of several tribes ; 
?’se has the same signification in Tsi,Koh’tin, and so it is with the 7sz 
and the /’so of the Hare and other Indians. 
Now the following entry appears in Dr. Campbell’s lately published 
Déné and Tungus vocabulary : 
Grass—(Déné) klo, klos, kkloh. (Tungusic) : orcho, orokto, orat. 
Here evidently the basis of comparison lies entirely with the letter 0 
which, being a vowel and, as such, very changeable in Déné, could not 
by any means afford a solid ground for assimilation. This vowel is so 
little immutable even in connection with the equivalents for “grass” 
(where it seems at first glance to be more persistent than in other words), 
that a portion of the Carrier tribe, while keeping the root 770 as a 
synonym for grass, change it into 77a in the compound noun 770-’kzwat 
(grass-on, 2.2., prairie. ) 
Therefore a word of vocalic inflection totally different from that of a 
heterogeneous race may be identical therewith if its consonantal elements 
are analogous. As evidence of this proposition I need only adduce the 
native word for “hog,” in the language of three very distinct American 
families, viz., the Iroquois, the Algonquin, and the Déné. The main 
body of the Iroquois call it by onomatopceia kwzeskw7s, and those of 
Sault Ste. Mariesay kweskwes. The Algonquins of Eastern Canada have 
altered its name into fokoc, and those of the western plains, the Crees, 
call the animal wkus, while the peculiar law of the sequence of vowels 
proper to their language has prompted the Carriers to soften the word 
into kakus. This example makes it plain that the trans-Rockies tribe 
has derived its name of the hog, through a successive linguistic filiation 
wherein the principal consonants have remained intact, from the original 
* ““Were used ” would perhaps be more correct since the invention of the vowel points by the doctors of 
Tiberias, but these accessories to the consonants can hardly be considered as genuine letters. 
