484 THE TLINGIT INDIANS [kth. anx .20 



family or stem. In Haida na means house, or to dwell, and hTna or Ina, 

 town. The occurrence of 1 as an initial vowel in Ilaida is rare and 

 suggests the possibility that it stands for the pronoun of the third 

 person, which is identical in form. Tlingit tan, on the other hiuid. 

 suggests Atliapasean thnii> or dine. 



A second aiuiiogv is furnished bj- the Tlingit intensive, or, as Pi'o- 

 fessor Boas has called it, selective suffix -tc. This is placed after nouns, 

 pronouns, and even adverbs, to which it is desin^d to call attention, as: 

 llngi't, intensive lingi'ttc, people; xAt, intensive xAttc, 1; Lei, inten- 

 sive LeiA'te, not. It recalls strongly iv Ilaida demonstrative, a'dj'i. The 

 a by itself would represent th(> usual Haida demonstrative indicating 

 something near at hand, and d), which is practically' the same as tc, 

 the Tlingit intensive. 



The consonant n is also persistently found in suffixes indicating dif- 

 ferent sorts of past action. Thus the onl}' Tlingit suffix of strongly 

 temporal charai'ter is -n, -In, or -dv. This seems to correspond most 

 nearly to the past ])erfect. At the same time it appears to refer by 

 preference to an action which has taken some time, or has been a cus- 

 tomary action. In ILiida.on the oth(>r hand, we have several suffixes; 

 g'nt. which indicates a customary j)ast action which the speaker has 

 himself observed or experienced; (Jaii, which indicates a simple past 

 action experienced Ijv the speaker; y,i«, indicating any sort of past 

 action; and tjAn, which indicates that an action has been or is being 

 continued for some time. The g or </ in each of these cases is not an 

 insuperable obstacle to a relationship between them and the Tlingit 

 suffix, because it is often dropped, especially in the Masset dialect, or 

 after d or t; in fact it is a ciuestion whether we should not rather 

 regard the g sounds as insertions instead of constituent parts of the 

 suffix. 



Most curious of all, perhaps, is the analogy presented by certain 

 affixes having s for their essential element. In Tlingit there is a prefix 

 6-- or.<.7-, which is always placed just before the verb stem and employed 

 in simple direct statements, past, present, or future, for which reason 

 it may be called the indicative prefix. Examples: lH da sa a'avixthi. 

 he did not see anything; w .s7dJA'(jx, they always killed them; dttcA'ttc 

 ye'yaos'iqa, his wife told him; daqane'.e wastti', he was quarrelsome. 

 In the same language we find a particle as of almost identical meaning 

 (xAte xixtcli'kl" .i.siyu' ducA'ttc de ayu' aolixa'c, this little frog it axis 

 he let float to his wife), and, in view of the great independence which 

 the parts of the vei'b enjo}', it is concluded that the two are actually 

 identical. Now, there is in Haida a very puzzling suffix, -.s- or -.sv, which 

 has a very wide range of use. After a noun preceded liy the indefinite 

 pronoun it makes the expression definite; in other cases it seems to 

 show that the clause it follows is to be taken as a whole — in other 

 words, to turn it into a participle or infinitive, and with some speakers 



