SWAXTONl INDIAN TRIBES OF THE LOWER MISSISSIPPI VALLKV 19 



trast botwo(Mi 'rai'iis!) and 'riinica <>:(M1(1('i\ lor while i::('ii»l<'i- in the 

 latter langua<>:e divides men and Avonien and masculine and feminine 

 animals, it also divides inanimate objects, such as sun and moon, 

 w ind. clouds, rocks, and trees, while in Taensa the feminine includes 

 all inanimate things, the male being confined to men and male 

 animals. This constitutes a point of difference between the two lan- 

 guages as wide as if no gender existed. Although Algonquian lan- 

 guages distinguish between animate and inanimate and IrcMjuois 

 presents analogies to Taensa in this particular, it is natural to In- 

 dians to personify inanimate objects sometimes as masculine and 

 sometimes as feminine, and therefore the Taensa line of demarcation 

 is less probable than the Tunica one which agrees in this particular 

 very closely with the Chinook system. 'J'he method of distinguishing 

 masculine and feminine pronominal forms is also decidedly unlike, 

 Taensa employing a suffix while Tunica uses entirely distinct forms. 

 A difference not mentioned by Brinton which marks this language 

 off from anything in its immediate vicinit}^ is the presence of a long 

 series of instrumental prefixes, a i)henomenon common in Siouan 

 dialects and in many others but nonexistent in tliose spoken along the 

 lower Mississippi. Perhaps the strongest objection from a linguistic 

 point of view is one that would not at first occur to most students, 

 and that is the absolute lexical difference between this language and 

 any of its supposed neighbors. However self-sufficient a language 

 nmy bo it is almost certain to have a few borrowed words, and the 

 languages of the south are no exceptions in this particular. Several 

 words, notably those for ' war-club,' ' buffalo,' * opossum,' and ' fish,' 

 are connnon to a number of related stocks, but in this new grammar 

 we recognize not one of them, nor indeed more than two or three 

 slight resemblances to any American language whatever. The only 

 exceptions are, perhaps,* in the case of the pronominal stems for 

 the second and third persons singular, in which sounds iri and ' 5 

 occur prominently, agreeing closely with those appearing in Tunica. 

 The phonetics are no less strange, not only on account of their num- 

 ber but from the occurrence in one language of v^ or /, and r, which 

 elsewhere on the lower Mississippi are confined to different stocks. 



The writer has left until the last, because this is the point on Avhich 

 new light has recently been thrown, the direct statements of early 

 travelers and missionaries regarding the Taensa language of their 

 day. Brinton, it Avill be remembered, adduced the testimony of three 

 writers to the effect that the Taensa language was the same as that of 

 the Natchez. This testimony is by De Montigny in 1699," by Gravier 

 in 1700,'' and by Du Pratz, whoso information dates from 1718 to 

 1734," and their meaning is plain and unqualified. Gatschet replied 



" Shoa, Early Voy. Miss., 76, 1861. 

 "Ibid., 136. 

 <^ Du Pratz, Hist, de La I.ouisiane, ii, 21.3, 225, 



