■496 



REPORT — 19UU 



' slangey ' phrases are quite common, and these are active factors of change in tlie 

 Sk-qo'mic language as in others. Chief Thomas and others of the older men informed 

 me that the language had, changed considerabl}' during the past fifty years, and that 

 every generation of speakers brought in new phrases and espressions, some of which 

 die out and are forgotten, wliile others are perpetuated and in time become 'classic' 

 or correct forms of speech. It is clear, therefore, that precisely the same laws 

 prevail in the speech of barbarous, unlettered peoples like the Sk-qo'mic as in the 

 language of cultivated and literary stocks. 



The vowel sounds in Skqo'mic are even more indeterminate than in the 

 X'tlaka'pamuQ. The long vowels are in this respect more at fault than the short 

 1 nes : 6- and ai final I found particularly troublesome, and at first I was constantly 

 chano-ing from the one to the other, no two Indians uttering them exactly alike. A 

 similar trouble is found in dealing with au and o. So marked is this characteristic 

 of the Sk-qO'mic vowel that the vocabularies of diiferent collectors would be found to 

 agree but rarely, no matter how carefully they might work. 



Consonants. 



t as in English. Throughout my studies of the Sk-qO'mic tongue I have been 

 unable to detect the corresponding sonant d. Indeed, I am inclined to think that 

 sonants, as distinct from surds, are altogether wanting in 8k-q6'mic. In looking 

 through my collection of terms I find but one single example of g-, and that the 

 harsh form, which at best is only a surd-sonant ; no h at all and no true z, though I 

 have sometimes written this sonant ; and in looking over the short vocabulary of the 

 Sk-qo'mic tongue given in the Comparative Vocabulary in the Sixth Report on the 

 N.W. Tribes of" Canada, by Dr. Boas, I find that it does not contain a single term 

 with a sonant in it. 



k, as in English. 



k-, approximately like the final 7i in the word Jiiclt, uttered forcibly. 



g-, rare. In sound it differs little from Jr. 



q, as in the German cJi in Bach. 



Q, approximately like our wh, but with more force. 



II, as in German cli in ich. 



h, y, w, m, n, 1, s, as in English ; p sometimes as in English, sometimes with a 

 suspicion of the corresponding sonant about it ; a quality of sound impossible to 

 render by any written symbol ; c as in English sh ; tc as in English ch in the word 

 church ; ts, tz, as uttered in English ; tl an explosive 1 approximately like the Welsh 

 11 ; si somewhat as in English, but easily mistaken for tl as uttered by some natives; 

 kl as in English ; c as in English th, as in the word thin. In uttering « some of the 

 natives show a tendency to convert it into ts, these two sounds being practically 

 interchangeable in Sk-qO'mic. The character of the consonants is not nearly so 

 indeterminate as the vowels. The commonest interchanges are : — k-, k ; k-, q ; q, Q ; 

 Q, H ; H, h. To mark the hiatus which occurs in certain words I have employed the 

 apostrophic sign ; as ts'qamts = sap 



Accent and Tone. 



Accentuation is a marked feature of the Sk-qo'mic. Every word that contains 

 more than one syllable has, according to its length, one or more accented syllables. 

 The importance of the accent is seen in such words as have a common form or sound 

 but difierent meaning. For example, the word sk-o'mai with the accent on the first 



