BOAS] HANDBOOK OF AMERICAN INDIAN LANGUAGES 75 



ative; t- I; i'tkar^ dirt; -pU to dig [rp in contact, form 'w]); or the 

 Oneida g-nagla'-sl-i-zaJc-s i search for a village {g- I; -nagla' to 

 live; -si- abstract noun; -i- verbal character; -zalc to search; -s 

 continu ative). 



A more thorough knowledge of the structure of many American 

 languages shows that the general designation of all these languages as 

 polysynthetic and incorporating is not tenable. We have in Amer- 

 ica a sufficiently large number of cases of languages in which the 

 pronouns are not incorporated, but joined loosely to the verb, and 

 we also have numerous languages in which the incorporation of many 

 elements into a single word hardly occurs at all. Among the Ian- 

 guages treated here, the Chinook may be given as an example of 

 lack of polysynthesis. There are very few, if any, cases in which a 

 single Chinook word expresses an extended complex of ideas, and we 

 notice particularly that there are no large classes of ideas which are 

 expressed in such form that they may be considered as subordinate. 

 An examination of the structure of the Chinook grammar will show 

 that each verbal stem appears modified only by pronominal and a few 

 adverbial elements, and that nouns show hardly any tendency to 

 incorporate new ideas such as are expressed by our adjectives. On 

 the other hand, the Athapascan and the Haida and Tlingit may be 

 taken as examples of languages which, though polysynthetic in the 

 sense here described, do not readily incorporate the object, but treat 

 both pronominal subject and pronominal object as independent ele- 

 ments. Among the languages of northern North America, the Iroquois 

 alone has so strong a tendency to incorporate the nominal object into 

 the verb, and at the same time to modify so much its independent 

 form, that it can be considered as one of the characteristic languages 

 that incorporate the object. To a lesser extent this trait belongs also 

 to the Tsimshian, Kutenai, and Shoshone. It is strongly developed 

 in the Caddoan languages. All the other incorporating languages 

 treated here, like the Eskimo, Algonquian, and Kwakiutl, confine them- 

 selves to a more or less close incorporation of the pronominal object. 

 In Shoshone, the incorporation of the pronominal object and of the 

 nominal object is so weak that it is almost arbitrary whether we 

 consider these forms as incorporated or not. If we extend our view 

 over other parts of America, the same facts appear clearly, and it is 

 not possible to consider these two traits as characteristics of all 

 American languages. 



