572 BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY [bull. 40 



tactic words are often phonetically weak, and consist sometimes of 

 single consonants, of consonantic clusters, of single vowels, or of weak 

 monosyllables. In combination these may form polysyllabic words. 

 The particles are necessarily of such phonetic character that they 

 can stand by themselves. For these reasons, both classes of words 

 appear as fixed phonetic and formal units, so that in Chinook there 

 can be no doubt as to the limits of words. 



The grammatical processes applied with these two classes of words 

 differ. Some of the particles may be duplicated, while duplication 

 and reduplication never occur in syntactic words. Particles when 

 transformed into syntactic words may, however, retain their dupli- 

 cations. Syntactic words are modified by means of prefixes and 

 suffixes and by modification of the stem, which, however, is probably 

 always of phonetic origin. Prefixes are much more numerous than 

 suffixes, but are phonetically weaker, rarely consisting of more than 

 a single sound. They appear in considerable numbers in single 

 words. Six prefixes in one word are not by any means unusual. 

 The number of suffixes that may appear in combination is more 

 limited. They are phonetically stronger. More than two or tliree 

 suffixes are rarely found in one word. 



Word-composition is not infrequent. However, some of the ele- 

 ments which enter into composition rarely appear alone, or rather, 

 combined with syntactic elements only. They represent principally 

 a definite group of local ideas, and therefore give the impression of 

 being affixes rather than independent stems. These words are, for 

 instance, motion into, out of, up, down (see § 27). Setting aside 

 compound words of this class, composition of independent stems, or 

 rather of stems which are used with syntactic elements only, is infre- 

 quent. Nouns are, however, largely of complex origin, and in many 

 of them stems and affixes may be recognized, although the significance 

 of these elements is not known to us. 



The position of the word is quite free, while the order of the con- 

 stituent elements of syntactic words is rigidly fixed. 



§ 15. IDEAS EXPRESSED BY GRAMMATICAL PROCESSES 



In discussing the ideas expressed by means of grammatical forms, 

 it seems best to begin with syntactic words. All syntactic relations 

 of these are expressed by pronominal and adverbial prefixes. Syn- 



§15 



