412 



SCIEJ^GE. 



[Vol. IX., ^'o 221 



except that they came from Avoyelles parish, perhaps 

 thirty years ago. They call their own tribe ' Tdneks,' 

 ' Tdnuks,' or ' Tdnks,' but cannot interjDret this name. 

 The Tunicas call them ' Y6roni.' The presumption 

 is that the other tribes living in their neighborhood 

 when they were still upon the Grulf coast (Pascagou- 

 las, Chozettas, Moctoby) spoke Dakotan dialects 

 also ; and the discovery of the Biloxi language is of 

 great impoi'tance, becaiise it upsets the old theory 

 that the so-called Oha'hta tribes of the Gulf coast, 

 or southern Cha'hta tribes, spoke Cha'hta dialects 

 throughout. The Bayagoulas and Mugulashas prob- 

 ably did so ; but of the Humas, Tchaouachas, To- 

 homes, Tangipahoa, and Opelousas, this cannot be 

 said with certainty. They all used, however, the 

 Cha'hta or Mobilian trade language as a means of 

 inter commimicati on . 



Before the Biloxis on Indian Creek left Avoyelles 

 parish, they lived there peaceably with another tribe, 

 the Tunica. Some twenty-five of these still remain 

 in their old homes on the Marksville prairie, a little 

 to the south-east of Marksville, the parish seat. 

 They are the Tassenocogoulas and Avoyelles of the 

 old documents. In the eighteenth century other 

 Tunica villages existed besides these, — the Tunicas 

 on lower Yazoo Eiver, and those on Mississippi 

 Eiver a few miles below the Red Eiver junction. ^ 

 Those in Avoyelles parish called themselves Shixkal- 

 tini, or ' flint people,' after a former chief, as alleged. 

 Of these, I found a young man at Lecompte, from 

 whom I obtained thorough information on his lan- 

 guage. The only mode of disposing of the dead 

 :among the southern Indians seems to have been that 

 of inhumation. 



Comparisons made with the vocabularies of all 

 the languages formerlj' spoken in the countries on 

 both sides of the lower Mississippi Eiver and its 

 affluents, even with the Pdni dialects, as Caddo, 

 Ydtassi, Nadaco, Wichita, have showil that affinity 

 •existed with none of them, and that therefore Tonica 

 represents a linguistic family for itself. It has many 

 phonetic peculiarities. The sound /, which is so 

 frequent in the Maskdki dialects, is wanting here, 

 as well as v. Instead of ts, ds, the language has tcli, 

 dsh. Of trills, we find I beside r and the uvular r, 

 the r being not our rolling r, but the sound heard in 

 ' mar,' ' bar.' Z)and 6 occur very seldom, and inter- 

 change with t and p, as g does with k. The surd 

 guttural k almost in every instance interchanges with 

 xk. This is done, for instance, in the numeral 

 ■series, which is decimal, and in the name of the 

 people itself, which may be pronounced ' Tiinika ' 

 or ' Tunixka,' — a compound of ta- (a sort of an 

 article, ' the '). uni, or 6ni (' man,' ' people '), and a 

 suffix, -ka, -xka. The language is nasalizing, though 

 not so strongly as Cha'hta, and is more vocalic than 

 the latter. 



In morphology the language is distinct from other 

 ■southern tongues, 1", by having a feminine besides 

 the masculine form in the noun, pronoun, and verb ; 

 2°, by having a dual of three persons in the pro- 

 noun and the verb ; 3*, by the above article, ta-, 

 te-, t- ; and, 4°, by a sort of reduplication of the 

 radix in some of the shorter adjectives and verbs, 

 which differs entirely from the reduplication f otind 

 in the Mask6ki dialects. The existence of a mas- 

 culine and a feminine gender, shown by the append- 

 ing of -ku for the masculine, and -tchi, -htchi, -xtchi, 



1 These Tonicas -were tlie stanchest Indian friends and 

 allies of the French colonists on the lower Mississippi. 



for the feminine, is extremely curious, and, since it 

 extends to the substantive noun also, finds very few 

 analogies in American languages (northern Tinne 

 dialects, Maya, Carib, and the disputed Taensa). 

 The words for ' woman ' (niixtchi) and for ' female ' 

 (tPhtchi) contain this suffix also, and, from what I 

 have observed, the term ' feminine' seems better ap- 

 plied here than ' metarrhenic,' which was projDOsed 

 for similar distinctions by French linguists. 1 have 

 obtained sev«>ral highly interesting tales, evidently 

 very ancient, in the Tonica langiiage, with interlinear 

 translation in Creole French. 



Being unable to find any person who could reliably 

 inform me of the present whereabouts of the Kardn- 

 kawa tribe, once upon the Texan coast near Lavaca 

 Bay, I repaired to San Antonio, in Bejar county, 

 Tex. The so-called Mexicans living in and around 

 that rising city, and selling their produce upon the 

 large market-square, have an Indian countenance 

 and expression, with the same ashy complexion 

 which I had previously observed among the Kdyowe 

 Indians. They all speak Spanish, but nevertheless 

 I was forcibly struck with the idea that these must 

 be the descendants of the Indians once gathered into 

 the Alamo and the four missions, now in ruins along 

 the San Antonio Eiver, south-west of the city. Our 

 information upon these tribes is so defective that 

 we scarcely know their names. It is surmised, how- 

 ever, that all or some of them spoke dialects of one 

 family, which has been called ' Coahuilteco ' or ' Te- 

 jano ' by Orozco y Berra (1864). 



From Laredo, Webb county, Tex., I went south to 

 Camargo, and found, in the vicinity of San Miguel, 

 the terminus of the railroad to Matamoros, the rem- 

 nants of the Comecrudo ('raw-eating') tribe, who 

 have established their cane-lodges on both sides of 

 the track near Las Prietas. They are commonly 

 called ' Carrizos ' by the whites, but insist on being 

 called ' Comecrudos,' the extinct Carrizos having 

 lived at Camargo and north-west of that town. Only 

 the oldest men and women of the Comecrudos re- 

 member the langtiage or converse in it among them- 

 selves. A part of these Indians formerly lived in 

 the woods to the south, at Charco Escondido. The 

 full-blood Comecrudos seen by me were slim and 

 tall, some of them of a whiter complexion than the 

 Mexicans around them. The pronunciation of these 

 Indians is remarkably clear, and only a few words 

 contain nasal sounds. The language is lacking the 

 sounds/, r, tch, dsh, ts, ds, b, and d, but diphthongs 

 are frequent. Only two tenses are extant, but the 

 noun is inflected by some cases of a locative char- 

 acter. A demonstrative particle, pa- ovpe-, is found 

 before almost every noun, and in some verbs also. 

 There is also a tendency to oxytonize many words, 

 especially substantives, although the accent shifts, 

 as in other Indian languages. 



The same simplicity and paucity of sounds is found 

 in the Cotoname language, formerly spoken in the 

 same district. I could find only one man living who 

 remembered words of it, and I had to visit him 

 several times before he could gather up his recollec- 

 tions so as to rely on them as truthful. As late as 

 1850 the naturalist Berlandier, who lived in Mata- 

 moros, had no difficulty in obtaining a full vocab- 

 ulary of that language, but I obtained only about 

 one hundred terms. It differs so considerably from 

 Comecrudo, that I thought at first I had secured a 

 representative of a new family, but subsequently 

 discovered it to be a distant dialectic form of the 



