PHONETIC SIDE OF INDIAN SPEECH. 3 



more regularly and often show a closer observance of logical principles 

 than those of peoples of ancient civilization has often been pointed out, and, 

 so far as it relates to the contrast between inflective and agglutinative lan- 

 guages, can no longer be doubted. Agglutinative tongues are spoken by 

 most of the savage races, and, as to their morphology, show more regularity 

 in their inflections, because the affixes are not so much altered and ground 

 down by phonetic wear and tear as the affixes of inflective languages. This 

 is because in the former languages the mental force binding and fusing the 

 affixes to the root has acted less powerfully than in the latter. The natives 

 still retain in their minds the original meaning of each verbal or nominal affix, 

 whereas this remembrance has been long since obliterated among the indi. 

 viduals speaking inflective tongues ; and the regularity of inflections natu- 

 rally results in the other group from the indiscriminate addition of these 

 to each root or base of the language. A language rich in grammatic forms 

 is usually simple in its syntax. 



But in their phonology most agglutinative languages do not show the 

 regularity observed in their grammatic forms. Physical agencies, hidden as 

 yet from our mental eye, produce alternations of the sounds pronounced with 

 the same organ of the vocal tube, which in some of the languages are profuse, 

 in others less numerous. In most North American languages we notice the 

 interchangeability of the surd and the sonant explosives, of the sounds of 

 the labial, lingual, etc. series, of o and ^«, of a and e, and in the language 

 of the Mdklaks the alternation of sounds, of which a table is given below, 

 plays a very jirominent part. When a word is pronounced in six or more 

 different ways, as in this language, it evidently should not appear so often 

 in the Dictionary, but on the other hand it would be most unscientific to 

 apply a preconcerted, uniform phonetic representative to each of these 

 words. This rule has often been adopted in the notation of other Ameri- 

 can languages, all terms with initial labial (b, p, m, v, w) having, for 

 instance, been written either with b or m. I have in the Dictionary pre- 

 ferred the method of placing at the head of each item that phonetic form, of 

 the ivonl which is most frequently heard,, and of subjoining to it the other, or 

 a few of the other phonetic forms, the order in which they follow suggesting 

 the order of their frequency. 



