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10 BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY iBone. 72 
IT may add that the works of Watkins and Lacombe on Cree, Cuoq 
on Algonkin, and Baraga on Chippewa have more than once been of 
great service to me in working out both the translation and the list 
of stems, as have also the works of Jones on Fox. 
The punctuation of the Indian text and the English translation 
has been made to correspond as closely as possible. The only essen- 
tial point to note is that it has not always been feasible to make the 
commas correspond. 
The paragraphing (which is the same in both) has been done largely 
with a view to English usage. However, it has often been possible 
to take advantage of the well-known feature of Algonquian lan- 
guages that identity and difference in third persons are kept apart 
by means of grammatical devices. 
The text, as stated above, was written out by Alfred Kiyana in the 
current syllabary, on which see Jones in the Boas Anniversary Vol- 
ume, pages 88-93. It was subsequently dictated a couple of times 
by Edward Davenport, and thus phonetically restored by me. The 
second dictation was in order to correct spelling-pronunciations, as 
the Fox are not accustomed to read letters or other documents writ- 
ten in the current syllabary aloud. When they first attempt it they 
are very apt to read the syllables with conventionalized values, thus 
la, le, li, lo as pa, pe, pi, pd, irrespective of the fact that these values 
are likely to be-wrong in any given instance, for da, etc., may equally 
well represent p4, pd, pi, pu, as well as other alternatives. I had 
previously trained Edward Davenport to read nearly correctly; and 
with the second dictation blemishes arising in this manner have, I 
think, been practically eliminated. - A few visual errors have been 
corrected by me. ; : 
There is another source of error which may occur in restoring a text 
dictated from a manuscript written in the current syllabary, and one 
difficult to control, namely, owing to the deficient phonetic character 
of the syllabary homographs may occur; that is, a word in the sylla- 
bary may be capable of two distinct phonetic restorations both equally 
justifiable but with entirely different meanings; and the wrong word 
may be dictated. An example is a ya ga te ki, which may be equally 
well aiya’‘kwatig*" ‘‘as far as. light goes,” or aiyd’gwatég*** “in a 
pile.” Fortunately homographs are not very frequent. It may be 
noted that a second dictation will not always remove blemishes of 
this nature; the word cited above was twice dictated with the wrong 
value. A grammatical analysis and the context are the only safe 
correctives to eliminate defects of this character. 
If I have spent much space in pointing out errors which are liable 
to occur in recording texts dictated from manuscripts written in the 
current syllabary, it is because they have hitherto been ignored. At 
the same time I am firmly convinced that more idiomatic texts and 
