BULL. 30] 



LANGUAGES 



757 



their lands. Until the passage of the act 

 of Mar. 3, 1871, all cession Avas by treaty, 

 the United States negotiating with the 

 tribes as with foreign nations; since then 

 agreements have been less formal, and a 

 recent decision of the U. S. Supreme 

 Court makes even the agreement or con- 

 sent of the Indians unnecessary. The 

 tribes living in Arizona, California, Ne- 

 vada, New Mexico, and Utah came under 

 the provisions of the treaty of Guadalupe 

 Hidalgo, most of the Pueblos holdingtheir 

 lands under Spanish grants. All Indian 

 reservations have been established either 

 by treaty or by order of the President, but 

 in both cases the Indian's tenure is that of 

 occupancy only. "They may not cut 

 growing timber, open mines, quarry stone, 

 etc., to obtain lumber, coal, building ma- 

 terial, etc., solely for the purpose of sale or 

 speculation. Inshort, whatatenantforlife 

 may do upon the lands of a remainder-man 

 the Indians may do upon their reserva- 

 tions, but no more. " In a few cases reser- 

 vations have been patented to tribes, as 

 those of the Five Civilized Tribes, and a 

 limited number of tribes have had their 

 lands apportioned and received patents 

 for individual holdings, yet no general 

 change in the Indian land tenure took 

 place until the passage of the severalty act 

 in 1887. This act provided for the allot- 

 ment to each man, woman, and child of 

 a certain portion of the tribal land and 

 the issuance of a patent by which the 

 United States holds the allotment in trust, 

 free of taxation and encumbrance, for 25 

 years, when the allottee is entitled to a 

 patent in fee simple. On the approval 

 of their allotments by the Secretary of the 

 Interior the Indians become citizens of 

 the United States and subject to its laws. 

 Seventy-three tribes already hold their 

 lands under this tenure. See Govern- 

 mental policy, Legal status, Reservations, 

 Treaties, Social organization. 



Consult Adair, Hist. Am. Indians, 282, 

 1775; Bandelier in Archfeol. Inst. Papers, 

 HI, 201, 272, 1890; Cushing in Millstone, 

 IX, 55, 1884; Dawson, Queen Charlotte 

 Islands, 117, 1878; Fletcher, Indian FAu- 

 cationand Civilization, 1888; Grinnell in 

 Am. Anthrop., ix, no. 1, 1907; Jenks in 

 19th Rep. B. A. E., 1900; Powell in 7th 

 Rep. B. A. E., 39-41, 1891; Royee, Indian 

 Land Cessions, 18th Rep. B. A. E., 1889; 

 Willoughby in Am. Anthrop., viii, no. 1, 

 1906. (a. c. F.) 



Languages. The American languages 

 show considerable variety in phonetics 

 and structure. While some are vocalic 

 and appear melodious to our ear, others 

 contain many consonant sounds to which 

 we are unaccustomed and wdiich seem to 

 give them a harsh character. Particularly 

 frequent are sounds produced by contact 

 between the base of the tongue and the 



soft palate, similar to the Scotch ch in 

 loch, and a nmnber of explosive I's, which 

 are i^roduced by pressing the tongue 

 against the palate and suddenly expelling 

 the air between the teeth. Harshness 

 produced by clustering consonants is pe- 

 culiar to the N. W. coast of America. 

 Sonorous vocalic languages are found in 

 a large part of the Mississippi basin and 

 in California. Peculiar to many Ameri- 

 can languages is a slurring of terminal 

 syllables, which makes the recording of 

 grammatical forms difficult. 



Contrary to the prevalent notion, the 

 vocabularies are rich and their grammat- 

 ical structure is systematic and intricate. 

 Owing to the wealth of derivatives it is 

 difficult to estimate the number of words 

 in any American language; but it is cer- 

 tain that in every one there are a couple 

 of thousand of stem words and many 

 thousand words, as that term is defined 

 in P^nglish dictionaries. 



A considerable variety of grammatical 

 structure exists, but there are a few com- 

 mon traits that seem to be characteristic 

 of most American languages. The com- 

 plexity of grammar is often great because 

 many ideas expressed by separate words 

 in the languages of other continents are 

 expressed by grammatical processes in the 

 languages of the Indians. The classifica- 

 tion of words differs somewhat from the 

 familiar grouping in Indo-European lan- 

 guages. The demarcation between noun 

 and verb is often indistinct, many ex- 

 pressions being both denominative and 

 predicative. Often the intransitive verb 

 and the noun are identical in form, while 

 the transitive verb only is truly verbal in 

 character. In other languages the tran- 

 sitive verb is nominal, while the intran- 

 sitive only is truly verbal. These phe- 

 nomena are generally accompanied by 

 the use of possessive pronouns with the 

 nominal and of personal pronouns with 

 the verbal class of words. In other cases 

 the verbal forms are differentiated from 

 the noun, but the close relationship be- 

 tween the two classes is indicated by the 

 similarity of the pronominal forms. The 

 intransitive verb generally includes the 

 ideas which Indo-European languages 

 express by means of adjectives. Inde- 

 pendent pronouns are often compounds, 

 and the pronoun appears in most cases 

 subordinated to the verb. 



In the singular are distinguished self 

 (or speaker), person addressed, and per- 

 son spoken of; in the plural, correspond- 

 ing to our first person, are often distin- 

 guished the combination of speaker and 

 persons addressed, and speaker and per- 

 sons spoken of, the so-called inclusive 

 and exclusive forms. 



The demonstrative pronouns are analo- 

 gous to the personal pronoun in that they 



