288 BUEEAU OF AMEEICAN ETHNOLOGY [bull. 40 



whom my material in the Nass river dialect has been gathered used 

 the hiatus frequently, without, however, giving the preceding stop 

 enough strength to justify the introduction of a fortis. A few people 

 from other villages, whom 1 heard occasionally, seemed to use greater 

 strength of articulation; and there is little doubt that the older mode 

 of pronunciation had a distinct series of strong stops. In the Tsim- 

 shian dialect the fortis survives clearly in the t and p; while the ts 

 and h fortis have come to be verj' weak. I have also observed in this 

 dialect a distinct fortis of the y, %', m^ n, and I. In these sounds 

 the increased stress of articulation brings about a tension of the vocal 

 chords and epiglottis, the release of which gives the sound a strongly 

 sonant character, and produces a glottal stop preceding the sound 

 when it appears after a vowel. Thus the fortes of these continued 

 sounds are analogous to the Kwakiutl ^y, ^w^ ^w?, ^;?, and H. Pre- 

 sumably the same sounds occur in the Nass dialect, although they 

 escaped my attention. Differentiation between surd and sonant is 

 difficult, particularly in the velar h series. 



The phonetics of Tsimshian take an exceptional position among the 

 languages of the North Pacific coast, in that the series of I stops are 

 missing. Besides the sound corresponding to our /, we find only the 

 ?, a voiceless continued sound produced by the escape of air from the 

 space behind the canine teeth; the whole front part of the mouth being 

 filled by the tip of the tongue, which is pressed against the palate. The 

 Tsimshian dialect has a continued sonant k sound, which is exceedingly 

 weak and resembles the weak medial i\ which has almost no trill and is 

 pronounced a little in front of the border of the hard palate. It cor- 

 responds to the sound in Tlingit which Swanton (see p. 165) writes y, 

 but which I have heard among the older generation of Tlingit distinctly 

 as the same sound as the Tsimshian sound here discussed. With the 

 assumption that it was originally the continued sonant corresponding 

 to X of other Pacific Coast languages agrees its prevalent xi tinge. I 

 feel, however, a weak trill in pronouncing the sound, and for this 

 reason I have used the symbol r for denoting this sound. In some 

 cases a velar trill appears, which I have written r. 



In the Nass dialect, liquids (m, n^ I) that occur at the ends of words 

 are suppressed. Tongue and lips are placed in position for these sounds, 

 but there is no emission of air, and hence no sound, unless a following 

 word with its outgoing breath makes the terminal sound audible. 



§2 



