BOAS] HANDBOOK OF AMERICAN INDIAN LANGUAGES 79 



Thus, the Kwakiutl pronounce wa'dEk^. If, however, another vowel 

 follows, the u which is not articulated appears as a w, as in the form 

 wa'dEkwa. 



The slurring, however, extends over whole syllables, which in these 

 cases may appear highly modified. Thus, in the Oneida dialect of 

 the Iroquois, a peculiar I sound is* heard, which presumably occurs 

 only in such slurred syllables. It is very remarkable that the Indi- 

 ans of all tribes are perfectly conscious of the phonetic elements 

 which have thus been suppressed, and can, when pressed to do so, 

 pronounce the words with their full endings. 



Another trait that is characteristic of many American languages, 

 and that deserves mention, is the tendency of various parts of the 

 population to modify the pronunciation of sounds. Thus we find 

 that among some Eskimo tribes the men pronounce the terminal p, t, 

 Ic, and q distinctly, while the women always transform these sounds 

 into m, n, n, and ;7. In some dialects the men have also adopted this 

 manner of pronouncing, so that the pronunciation has become uni- 

 form again. Such mannerisms, that are peculiar to certain social 

 groups, are of course not entirely foreign to us, but they are seldom 

 developed in so striking a manner as in a few of the Indian 

 languages. 



In many American languages we find highly developed laws of 

 euphony, — laws by which, automatically, one sound in a sentence 

 requires certain other sounds either to precede or to follow it. In the 

 majority of cases these laws of euphony seem to act forward in a man- 

 ner that may be compared to the laws of vowel harmony in the Ural- 

 Altaic languages. Particularly remarkable among these laws is the 

 influence of the o upon following vowels, which occurs in a few lan- 

 guages of the Pacific coast. In these, the vowels following an o in 

 the same word must, under certain conditions, be transformed into o 

 vowels, or at least be modified by the addition of a w. Quite differ- 

 ent in character are the numerous influences of contact of sounds, 

 which are very pronounced in the Siouan languages, and occur again 

 in a c{uite different form in the Pawnee. It may be well to give an 

 example of these also. Thus, in Dakota, words ending with an a and 

 followed by a word beginning with a ]c transform the former into e, 

 the latter into c. In Pawnee, on the other hand, the combination 

 tr is always transformed into an h; 6 following an i is generally 



