96 TRANSACTIONS OF THE CANADIAN INSTITUTE. [VoL. VI. 
taken such a keen interest. But my inmost convictions bid me declare, 
at the risk of appearing too self-confident, that the doctor’s verbal iden- 
tifications are, with a very few and unimportant exceptions, absolutely 
sroundless. The reader will please remember his several failures, which 
I have already pointed out as resulting from the violation of fundamen- 
tal laws of comparative philology. I may well pass over those assimi- 
lations which are attempted with words that are not roots. Let me add 
that a very large number of the terms he gives as Déné seem utterly 
extraneous to that linguistic family. Think, for instance, of such 
vocables as ¢elamachkur for fish, payyamay for man, alcorn for rain, 
kickchuly for cold, ttshukulak for eagle, stku-tsukars/a for girl, etc. Verily, 
any Russian or Bantu word taken at random would probably look more 
Déné. 
Among such words of Dr. Campbell’s Vocabulary as are undoubtedly 
Déné, many merely approximate in meaning the English term given as 
synonymous. Thus faywz is the equivalent, not of the English “boy,” 
but of the Latin vzv; szskay means “my child” instead of “daughter” in 
general ; gwzun should be translated * good,” not “strong”; ¢eshzntlan 
corresponds, not to the word wood, but to the phrase “many sticks,” and 
probably proceeds from some writer who had recourse to an interpreter 
during his intercourse with the natives. From such writers deliver the 
comparative philologist! Their mistakes are legion. Other words, as 
beye, bitst, paput, etc., mean respectively zs son (not child in general), 
his heart (or rather his head), Zzs belly, etc. They are deceitful in that, 
their pronominal prefix being taken as an integral part of the word, it 
concurs in suggesting identities that do not exist. In the Vocabulary in 
question the pronouns of the first and of the second persons are inter- 
verted. Sz means /, not thou, and I would be curious to learn where 
Dr. Campbell picked the word we, which he quotes as an equivalent for 
either of the two aforesaid pronouns. 
And yet with all those and many other inaccuracies for which I am 
far from holding him responsible, how many real identifications do we 
find through the whole list? Three, perhaps four, apart from the synony- 
mous terms for father and for mother, which are about homonymous 
in well nigh all languages. I know of more numerous genuine analogies 
between Chinese and Déneé words. Yet it is in the face of such pitiful 
results that our author triumphantly proclaims that “the argument for 
the original unity of the Dénés and the Tungus is as convincing as that 
which joins the Indo-Europeans or Aryans in one family”!* With all 
due respect to such a veteran as Dr. Campbell, I, for one, must be allowed 
* “The Dénés of America Identified,” etc., p. 206. 
