STUDYING THE INDIANS OF NEW MEXICO AND 



CALIFORNIA 



By JOHN P. HARRINGTON, 



Ethnologist, Bureau of American Ethnology 



The old dogma of the texthooks that the Pueblo Indians of New 

 Mexico and Arizona speak four stock languages unrelated with one 

 exception to other North American languages seems doomed to ulti- 

 mate abandonment according to indications revealed in a careful com- 

 parison of the Taos and Zuni languages made by me in New Mexico 

 as part of a general plan of reexamining these languages. The 

 work in 1930 was a continuation of researches begun the year be- 

 fore and described in " Explorations and Field-Work of the Smith- 

 sonian Institution in 1929." Working with Natchipanih, an excellent 

 informant if one already knows a little of the Zuni language, for 

 only his English is deficient and he does not hesitate in giving to his 

 friends the most sacred religious terms, a Taos dictionary was worked 

 over into the Zuni tongue, thus obtaining voluminous material for 

 comparisons — and contrasts. The Zuni language is spoken, at pres- 

 ent at least, in a single dialect, and by a population of some 1,600 

 individuals, nearly all of whom live in a single city as quaint and iso- 

 lated as Lhasa, the old Tibetan capital. This city is called Ciwin'ah. 

 and one of its inhabitants is called Ciwih ( Ciw'a : tchih, dual; 

 'A : ciwih, triplural ) . 



The language is about as harsh and clear sounding as German ; its 

 alphabet consists of 35 letters, including the five well-known vowels, 

 pronounced as in Spanish, varieties of stops with h after them and 

 with simultaneous choking in the larynx as well as the ordinary Span- 

 ish variety, k, n and ng inflected with y position as well as the ordinary 

 kind, and a Welch 11, written by the Polish character of 1 with a swipe 

 through it. Examples of the clean-sounding words of this language 

 are Towayalanneh, name of the famous mesa to be seen south of Zuni ; 

 and H6'°n'a : wona : wil'onah, God, or better Fate, one of the religious 

 words, literally Our Holder of the Trails. Although it was not neces- 

 sary for phonetic exactness, this work was supported by the obtaining 

 of several hundred kymographic tracings on sooted paper, which at 

 least give the satisfaction of showing for instance that a sound heard 

 as long had such or such a duration in units of the second. Some 



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