JOHN WKSLEY rOWEU, DAVIS 



r 



INDIAN LINGUISTIC FAMILIES. 



Assuredly, one of the most important inductive contribu- 

 tions of the Bureau of Ethnology to science is the monograph 

 on "Indian linguistic families," which, with the accompanying 

 map of North America, exclusive of Mexico, was published in 

 the Seventh Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology 

 (1891). The idea of such a monograph, accompanied by a 

 linguistic map, had been in Powell's mind for many years, but. 

 owing to the pressure of his manifold duties, its final planning 

 and execution was intrusted to his associate, Mr. H. W. Hen- 

 shaw, then in charge of the Bureau under him. Gallatin had 

 published a North American linguistic map in 1836; but the 

 Bureau map was based on a much larger body of material, and 

 followed Powell's own idea of lexic, not grammatic, classifica- 

 tion that is, linguistic relationship was determined for the 

 Indian languages by similarities between single words, not by 

 resemblances in the construction of genders and tensesj This 

 treatment was adopted because word-roots were believed to be 

 the most permanent elements of language, while grammatic 

 structure is but a changing phase. Indian languages to the 

 number of several hundred thus analyzed and compared were 

 grouped in stocks or families, the members of each of which 

 show fundamental lexic similarities believed to be inherited 

 from a common ancestral speech, while the different stocks 

 show no relationship whatever. During the long progress of 

 this work some languages were set apart which had at first 

 been placed together, and others were brought together after 

 having been at first separated; but in the end no fewer than 

 fifty-eight stocks were distinguished, all fundamentally differ- 

 ent, not as French is from German, but as French and German 

 are from Arabic and Hebrew ; for each stock includes a group 

 of languages, and the languages of some stocks are as diverse 

 as the Indo-European tongues. The areas occupied by the 

 stocks in their primitive distribution are represented by colors 

 on the map, and the results thus graphically shown are very 

 striking. First to be noted is the rarity of intermixed or frag- 

 mentary color areas ; second is the extraordinary contrast be- 

 tween the great extent of the areas of the Algonquian and 



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