Ill 



while the back of the tongue presses back and up against the 

 lowest part of the soft palate in order to form the slit or the 

 closure which is requisite for these sounds. All the back part 

 of the mouth-passage is thereby brought to act as a new ex- 

 tended resonance-chamber of a peculiar form; since this is in 

 all essentials independent of the movements of the rest of the 

 tongue, a vowel-position and an uvular articulation can very 

 well be concurrent. Different distances between the tongue and 

 the palate will give corresponding kinds of a-, e-, and o-vowels. 

 In determining the resonance-chamber of the vowel, the palate- 

 distance is measured up along the wall of the soft palate 

 from the same point (:'') where the r- and ^'-articulation takes 

 place, i. e. the foot of the soft palate (r := ^2^", a = y"!^)- 

 One might use as illustration here a covered canal-lock where 

 the water can only just spurt in at the very bottom (r-friction) 

 while the height of the lock measured from the same point 

 determines the resonance and natural pitch of the water's roaring. 



The vowels which are affected in this way have a remark- 

 able hollow and grating sound ; in the case of о and e it is 

 occasionally somewhat ö-like on account of the inner round- 

 ing in the mouth-chamber. 



There are, then, two entirely different kinds of resonance- 

 chambers to be taken into account in examining the Eskimo 

 vowel-sounds, and to them correspond the two chief classes of 

 vowels which I have determined upon in the vowel-system of this 

 language. The same distance between the tongue and the palate 

 will give different sounds according to whether the uvular friction 

 takes place or not. An e between two w's and an e between 

 two r's are acoustically widely different sounds. — The vowels 

 that are produced without uvular friction are of the same kind 

 as the majority of our vowels; the uvularized vowels are of a 

 more special nature. In French, for example, vowels before r 

 are not uvularized ; in Danish it may occur, even if to a much 

 less degree than in the Eskimo language. 



