40 PROCEEDINGS OF THE CANADIAN INSTITUTE. 



In attempting to affiliate the Salishans, I rely altogether on language. It has 

 two parts — the grammar and the vocabulary. Father Mengarini's grammar I have 

 not seen, but the " Niskwalli Dictionary" of Dr. George Gibbs exhibits the Salishan 

 grammatical system sufficiently for comparative purposes. That system is pre- 

 posing. It makes use of prepositions, not of postpositions. It also places the 

 governing word before its genitive, the adjective before its noun, the temporal index 

 before the verb. In these and in other particulars, Salishan grammar is not that 

 of Northern Asia, as are Iroquoian, Dakotan, Muskhogean, etc., nor that of Melan- 

 ■esia as the Haidah is, but that of the Malay-Polynesian area. Seventeen years ago 

 I exhibited, in a paper read before the Institute, the relation of the Algonquian 

 ■dialects to that same Malay-Polynesian family. It is not easy to draw a line 

 between what is Malay and what is Polynesian, either in grammatical forms or in 

 vocabulary, yet the Algonquian dialects may be called more Malay than Polynesian. 

 This appears most prominently in the word for man, which in Malay is oran or uliin, 

 whence the Ilinoans of Borneo have their name. But in America, the Delawares 

 are the lenni Lenape or the Lenape men, the State of Illinois was so called after the 

 Algonquian lUeni, and the Micmac calls himself tilnoo, a man. The Polynesian, 

 on the other hand, terms himself tangata or tamata, and that seems to be the 

 original of the Salishan tamihu, tamekhw, tumikh, temokli, tobesh, and stobush. If 

 therefore, a line is to be drawn between Malay and Polynesian, it may be inferred 

 that the Salishans are more Polynesian than Malay. 



In comparing the vocabularies, I have restricted myself, so far as the Salishan 

 dialects are concerned, to the Niskwalli. This is not for lack of material, since I 

 have vocabularies of over twenty other dialects, but for the sake of brevity and 

 clearness. The Niskwalli is that of Dr. George Gibbs, and the Malay- Polynesian 

 terms are taken from Crawford, Wallace, Belcher, Hale, and a variety of other 

 sources too numerous to mention. The words compared are the commoner nouns 

 and adjectives, a few verbs, the personal pronouns, the numerals, and some 

 particles, altogether over 150 in number. The evolution of the Salishan term from 

 the standard Malayan or Javanese is sometimes quite easy to follow, but in other 

 cases my comparative vocabularies have failed to present all the links desired. Most 

 of the distinctive Malay terms are conspicuous by their absence from the Niskwalli 

 vocabulary, such as kapala head, muka face, mata eye, talinga ear, idung nose, 

 mulut mouth, lidah tongue, tangan, lima hand, langit sky, ayer water, api iire. 

 But there are many evident Malay analogies, as of the Niskwalli kobatit axe, to 

 the Malay kapak ; toligwut blood, to darah; tus cold, to tijok ; eluks end, to alos ; 

 ashuts fear, to coquet ; silels forehead, to alis ; and tsoks seven, to tujuh. He would 

 be a bold philologer who would identify the Niskwalli skwalhip ashes, with the Malay 

 abu ; but abu becomes the Bali habu, the Sunda labhu, the Bouton orapit, a.nd the 

 Mysol gelap. A far more extraordinary metamorphosis is that of the Malay kasih, 

 to give, into the Niskwalli abshits. It first becomes the Bali sukahake, then the 

 Bisayan maghatag, next the Iloco pannangted, the Biajuk manenga, in another Bali 

 dialect bahang, afterwards the Tagala bigai, the Tahitian evaha, the Hawaiian hoatii, 

 and the Tobi wacito, which is not abshits, but is near enough to it for all practical 

 purposes. 



The Salishan dialects disguise their relationship with prefixes and affixes, the 

 meaning of which is little known. Take, for instance, the words for moon and sun. 

 The moon is slok-walm, in which the latter syllable is plainly the almost universal 

 Malay- Polynesian wulan, bulan, fulan, hulan, the moon. The sun is klok-watl, and 

 here again the second syllable is the Malay-Polynesian mataari, matalo, watalo, 

 batalo, the sun. What slok and klok or slo and klo mean, the dictionary does not 

 state. The peculiar progress from labial to sibilant and guttural through the 

 aspirate effectually obscures the unity of roots. This is apparent in chetla, the 



