LANOUAOES OF THE AMERICAN INDIANS 507 



written down. Documents were recorded in it and extensive grammars 

 and dictionaries prepared. These grammars and dictionaries are per- 

 fectly correct and entirely applicable to the Aztec language as it is 

 spoken to-day. The same is true of the various Maya dialects of Yuca- 

 tan. We possess records going back two centuries and more of Eskimo, 

 Algonkin, Iroquois and other languages of the United States and Can- 

 ada as well as of South American tongues. In no instance is any 

 notable change observable. It may in fact be doubted whether most 

 Indian languages have changed as much in pronunciation in the last 

 three hundred years as English has since the time of Skakespeare. 



Of course the vocabularies recorded some centuries ago and those 

 written down recently are often far from identical, but the principal 

 differences of this sort must be laid to the imperfect and often curious 

 systems of orthography used. Almost all Indian languages contain at 

 least some sounds that do not occur in the languages of Europe, The 

 Spanish conqueror or the French explorer would represent these unfamil- 

 iar sounds with different letters than the subsequent English settler or 

 German scientist. In fact differences fully as great as those between 

 old and modem vocabularies can be found in lists of words taken down 

 in the same period in recent times, by different observers, particularly 

 if these observers were of different nationality. It is probable that the 

 superstition as regards the alleged rapid change of Indian languages is 

 due largely to this cause. 



The conservatism of American languages is brilliantly illustrated 

 by the Athabascan family, another of the great linguistic stocks of 

 North America. All the Athabascan dialects are remarkably close, so 

 that a person acquainted with one could learn to understand another 

 in a very short time. The same grammatical processes continue 

 through all of them with almost no change. Yet some of the Athabas- 

 can tribes occupy the interior of Alaska and the northwestern parts of 

 Canada. Two branches are in the great plains: the Sarsee, closely 

 affiliated with the Blackfeet, and the Kiowa-Apache, almost amalga- 

 mated with the Kiowa though retaining their own speech. In New Mex- 

 ico and Arizona are the Navaho and Apache. In the interior of British 

 Columbia, just south of Puget Sound in Washington, along the coast 

 of Oregon, and in northwestern California, are other areas, each sepa- 

 rated from the other, in which Athabascan was spoken. The tribes 

 belonging to the family are scattered over parts of an area measured by 

 more than forty degrees of latitude and sixty of longitude and em- 

 bracing at least half of North America. Their original center of dis- 

 persion is unknown, but wherever they came from in the first place it 

 is clear that it must have taken them a very long time to force their 

 way individually over thousands of miles, over mountains and rivers, 

 and constantly crowding aside hostile tribes as they moved from one 



