INTRODUCTORY. 17 
tribal organizations and languages have become so hopelessly intermingled 
and confused, that they can no longer be classified. They are known as 
Diegenos, Miguelenos, Rafaelenos, and the like Spanish names, which are 
formed from the missions to which they respectively belonged; and for 
purposes of classification it is useless to take down a vocabulary and call it 
the “San Miguel language”, for instance, for the Indians who originally 
lived there may be all dead, while those who give the vocabulary may be 
descended from Indians brought by the Spanish missionaries from the San 
Joaquin Valley, or some other point a hundred miles distant, and which 
has been forgotten even by the whites. 
In this work I have followed the system of orthography recommended 
in the “Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections 160”, which is substantially 
the same as the Continental. Occasionally it is found necessary to employ 
the consonants 2g to denote the French nasal sound, also the German 
umlaut. Kh has the sound of ch in the German Buch. Indian words are 
accented and syllabicated the first time they occur; after that they are 
written solid. 
Owing to the great number of dialectic variations in California lan- 
guages, there is probably not an Indian word in this volume which a per- 
son knowing only one dialect could not prove to be wrong. 
27TC 
