MCGEE] DISTINCTIVENESS OF LANGUAGE 297* 



presenting no resemblance whatever to any other known tongue. The 

 remaining eighteen or twenty terms reveal resemblances to Aryan, 

 Piman, Cochimi, or other alien languages; bnt of these the majority 

 express Caucasian concepts, familiar enough to the outlaw informant, 

 Kolusio, though generally unfamiliar to Mashem and to other actual 

 inhabitants of Seriland. 



A critical census brings out six vocables presenting phonetic corre- 

 spondences with those of one or more Yuman dialects, viz, the terras for 

 tongue, tooth, eye, head, blood, and wood or tree. Now, examination 

 of these terms indicates that the first two probably, and the third and 

 fourth possibly, are associative demonstratives rather of mechanical 

 than of vocalic character — e. g., the terms for tooth and tongue are 

 merely directive sounds accompanying the exhibition of the organs, 

 so that while the terms may not be onomatopoetic iu ordinary sense, 

 they are instinctively mimetic or directive, in such wise as to indicate 

 that they may well have arisen spon; aueously and independently among 

 different primitive peoples; also that they might easily pass from tribe 

 to tribe as an adjunct of gesture-speech. The term for blood is still 

 more decidedly mimetic of the sound of the vital fluid gushing from a 

 severed artery, or of normal pulsation, so that it, too, must be classed 

 as a term of spontaneous development. The Seri term for wood or tree 

 has an apparent analogue, with somewhat ditlerent meaning, in the 

 (Jochimi alone; but since the knifeless Seri made practically no use of 

 wood in their aboriginal condition, and since the early Jesuit records 

 show that they sometimes transnavigated the gulf and came in contact 

 with the wood-using Cochimi, it seems fair to assume that material and 

 word were borrowed together. A similar sugges ion arises in connec- 

 tion with the term for dog; although the Seri have lived fiom time 

 immemorial in that initial stage of cotoleration with the coyote in 

 which the adult animals are permitted to scavenger the rancherias, 

 they were without domestic dogs until these animals were introduced 

 into northwestern Mexico by the Spaniards, when they apparently 

 absorbed the animal and its name at once from their eastern neighbors 

 of the Piman stock — presumably the Opata, or possibly the Papago, 

 with both of whom the Seri converts and spies were in frequent contact 

 during the Jesuits' regime at Opodepe, Populo, and Pitic. 



In weighing the linguistic relations, it is to be remembered that the 

 Seri are distinctive in practically every somatic and demotic character, 

 that they are bitterly antipathetic to aliens, and that their race-sense 

 is perhaps the strongest known. It is also to be remembered that they 

 are zoosematic in esthetic, largely zoomimic in their primitive indus- 

 tries, putatively zoocratic in government, and overweeniiigly zoothe- 

 istic in belief; that nearly all observers and recorders of their char- 

 acteristics have been impressed by both the distinctiveness and the 

 primitiveuess of their speech; that this speech abounds in associative 

 demonstratives and instinctive onomatoiies to excei^tioual degree; that 



