VOCABULARIES 

 INTRODUCTION 



Convinced of the importance and usefulness of a vocabulary, I 

 have published word-lists in my previously published Coos Texts and 

 Lower Umpqua Texts (see Authorities Cited, p. 19), adding to the 

 Indian-English vocabulary also an English-Indian glossary, as well 

 as an alphabetical list of all formative elements of these two languages. 



There exists another and more important reason for appending a 

 .vocabulary to the present volume of texts. In the present volume 

 we deal with an Indian language which, if not yet totally extinct, is 

 on the verge of extinction. At the time this collection of texts was 

 made (in 1910) less than half a dozen natives were left who still had 

 a speaking knowledge of their language. And they did not use their 

 original tongue in the every day conversations, preferring to use for 

 that purpose English or the Chinook jargon. The extent to which 

 the Alsea language was becoming a thing of the past may be judged 

 from the fact that I was unable to obtain the native terms for some 

 of the most important and simple animal and other names. Further- 

 more, my informants could not recollect many of the older stems 

 that had been used by the informants of the previous investigators 

 of this language. Thus the collection of myths made by Dr. Living- 

 ston Farrand only 10 years previously to my own collection (in 1900) 

 could not be translated fluently and intelligently by my informants; 

 and a large number of stems and terms contained in the vocabularies 

 that were collected by Mr. J. Owen Dorsey in 1884 were totally 

 unknown to the present-day Alsea Indians. Moreover, the children 

 of the Alsea Indians of to-day neither understand nor use the 

 tongue of their forefathers; so that we are perfectly safe in consider- 

 ing this language of the Pacific coast as practically extinct. 



Knowing, then, that it is impossible to obtain in the future addi- 

 tional linguistic data from this field, it was thought best to bring 

 together in one single volume all available material on the Alsea 

 language, not only for the guidance of the future student but also 

 for the preservation in print of this highly interesting language. 

 And in order to present a more complete vocabulary I included in it 

 not only the stems and nouns that occur in these texts, but also such 

 radicals and terms as were and could be obtained by other means. 

 Furthermore, all other previous collections of Alsea vocabularies 

 were consulted, and stems and nouns not obtained during the course 

 of my own investigations extracted and added to the present vocabu- 



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