IN THE KHITAN LANGUAGES. 287 



Aztecs and the Lencas; and in the south, the Muyscas of New 

 Granada, the Quichas, Aymaras, Atacamenos, Sapibocones and 

 Cayubabas of Peru, and the Chileno family, embracing the Chilians, 

 Pampas Indians, Patagonians and Fuegians. The Dacotah, Huron- 

 Iroquois, Choctaw, Shoshonese, Pujuni, Yuma, Pueblos, Sonora and 

 Lenca divisions comprise many dialects, and, as I propose to treat 

 the Chileno division as one under the name Araucanian, the same 

 will be true concerning it. The dialectic differences of the Basque 

 are few, as are those of the Circassian and Mizjeji, but the Geoi-gian 

 has four dialects, and the Lesghian at least ten. The Yeniseian, 

 Koriak, Kamchatdale, and Aino divisions each present tribal and 

 dialectic differences, and the language of the Loo Choo Islands pro- 

 vides a complement to that of Japan. These dialectic differences 

 .are valuable as furnishing the laws of phonetic change within the 

 bounds of a single language, and as aiding in the application of simi- 

 lar laws to forms of speech widely separated geographically. 



Instead of setting forth in this paper the whole of my compara- 

 tive vocabulary of over 150 words in the various languages and 

 dialects of the Khitan family, which would be more likely to con- 

 fuse than to convince, I prefer for the present to restrict myself to 

 an exhibition of some of the relations of one such language to its 

 connected forms of speech. The language selected is the Huron- 

 Iroquois in its various dialects, the Huron, Tuscarora, Nottoway, 

 Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, &c. This is one of the 

 most peculiar and difficult members of the family, differing from all 

 the others known to me in this particular, that no one of its dialects 

 possesses the labials b, p, v, f, or the liquid and labial m. The 

 nearest approach they can make to a labial sound is w, and where 

 m cannot be similarly represented it must be replaced by another 

 liquid, n. With the Huron-Iroquois language I compare first of all 

 that member of the family which, following the line of Khitan 

 migration backwards, is the most remote from it, namely the Basque 

 of northern Spain and south-western France. Grammatically the 

 two languages agree, for it has been rightly said that the Basque is the 

 most American of the Old World tongues known to philology. A better 

 acquaintance than is at present possessed of the languages of north- 

 eastern Asia would doubtless modify such a statement. Still it is well 

 to be on a right footing with the grammarians, although one of them, 

 M. Vinson, a distinguished Basque scholar, who, some time ago, pub- 



