Brinton. ] 218 [Oct. 5, 
Petitot calls this phenomenon ‘literal affinity,’’ and shows that in 
the Tinné it takes place not only between consonants of the same 
group, the labials for instance, but of different groups, as labials 
with dentals, and dentals with nasals. These differences are not 
merely dialectic; they are found in the same village, the same 
family, the same person.» They are not peculiar to the Tinné; they 
recur in the Klamath. Dr. Behrendt was puzzled with them in the 
Chapanec. ‘No other language,’’ he writes, ‘‘has left me in such 
doubt as this one. The same person pronounces the same word 
differently ; and when his attention is called to it, will insist that it 
is the same. ‘Thus, for devil he will give Zixamdi and Stsaimbui ; 
for hell, Makupaju and Nakapoti.’* Speaking of the Guarani, 
Father Montoya says, ‘‘ There is in this language a constant chang- 
ing of the letters for which no sufficient rules can be given.’’+ And 
Dr. Darapsky in his recently published study of the Araucanaian 
of Chile gives the following equation of permutable letters in that 
tongue : 
B=W=F=U=tU=I1=E=G=GH=HUt 
The laws of the conversion of sounds of the one organ into 
those of another have not yet been discovered, but the above ex- 
amples, which are by no means isolated ones, serve to admonish us 
that the phonetic elements of primitive speech probably had no 
fixedness. 
There is another oddity about some of these consonantal sounds 
which I may notice in passing. Some of them are not true elemen- 
tary sounds ; they cannot stand alone, but must always have another 
consonant associated with them. Thus, the labial B is common in 
Guarani; but it must always be preceded by an M. In Nahuatl the 
liquid L is frequent; but it is the initial of no word in that lan- 
guage. The Nahuas apparently could not pronounce it, unless some 
other articulate sound preceded it. 
Albornoz, in his Grammar of the Chapanec Tongue§, states that 
the natives cannot pronounce an initial B, G, Y, or D, without 
uttering an N sound before it. 
The third point in the phonology of these tongues to which I 
alluded is the frequency with which the phonetic elements as graphi- 
* Apuntes sobre la Lengua Chapaneca, MS, 
+ Arte dela Lengua Guarani, p. 93. 
t La Lengua Araucana, p. 15 (Santiago de Chile, 1883), 
2 Albornoz, Arte dela Lengua Chapaneca, p. 10. 
