GRAMMAR OF THE YUKAGHIR LANGUAGE 99 



was in vogue in the region of the Kolyma River and in the val- 

 leys along its tributaries ; the latter on the northern tundra, be- 

 tween the lower parts of the Kolyma and Lena Rivers. At the 

 present time the Kolyma dialect is confined to the region along 

 the Yassachna and Korkodon Rivers ; and the Tundra dialect 

 to the tundra between the Large Chukchee and the Alaseya 

 Rivers.^ 



Besides, the Chuvantzy language, which is now completely 

 extinct, and which was spoken in the former time to the east of 

 the Kolyma River, also used to be, according to all collected 

 data, a dialect of the Yukaghir language. 



The territory where the two former dialects are spoken is in- 

 dicated upon the accompanying map. 



I mastered the Yukaghir language sufficiently to obtain full 

 command of their grammatical forms, and not only to take ac- 

 curate records of the texts, but also to converse freely in it. 



The Hnguistic material on the Yukaghir dialects collected by 

 me is composed of a hundred and fifty texts, a dictionary con- 

 taining nine thousand words, in which many words from the 

 texts have not yet been entered, and vast phraseological material 

 for a complete grammatical outline of the two dialects. - 



The present article is an abridged grammatical sketch of the 

 Yukaghir language. The space at my disposal in the Annals 

 OF THE New York Academy of Sciences does not allow me to 

 introduce into this outline the peculiarities of the Tundra dia- 

 lect, and the article is thus mainly a brief sketch of the Kolyma 

 dialect. It may be noted here that the phonetical and morpho- 



1 A considerable part of the Yukaghir who used to speak this language has died 

 out ; a part, at the mouth of the Omolon River, on the lower course of the Kolyma 

 and on the banks of both the Large Anui and the Dry Anui Rivers has become 

 Russianized ; another part, on the tundra between the Indigirka and Yana Rivers, 

 has been assimilated by the Tungus ; and still another, on the tundra between the 

 Yana and Lena Rivers, has adopted the Yakut language. (See linguistic map. ) 



^Up to the present time a hundred texts have been published by the Imperial 

 Academy of Sciences at St. Petersburg, under the title, " Materials for the study of 

 the Yukaghir Language and Folk-Lore, collected in the Kolyma District, Part I, 

 St. Petersburg, 1900 " ; and an article containing a grammatical analysis of one text, 

 in the Bulletin de V Acadetnie Ijnpen'ale des Sciences de St. Petersboitrg, 1898, Sep- 

 tembre, T. IX, No. 2. 



