5o8 TEE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTELY 



residence to a new home. Here again, as in all the historical conclu- 

 sions which it is possible to draw from linguistic conditions in America, 

 we are dealing with periods measurable at least by thousands of years; 

 and yet in all this long lapse of time the Athabascan dialects have 

 changed but slightly and superficially. 



The Eskimo 



The Eskimo have often been proclaimed as an Asiatic people. 

 "While confined to the shores of Arctic America, their east and west 

 range is tremendous. If one follows the coast, as they must have done 

 in their migrations, the distance between their eastern and western out- 

 posts in Greenland and Alaska is at least 5,000 miles. Yet over this 

 whole stretch the language is so uniform that any one dialect is almost 

 entirely intelligible to the people of regions thousands of miles away. 

 The only divergent language belonging to the Eskimo stock is that of 

 the Aleutian Islands. Where the Eskimo came from is still a moot 

 problem, but as there is nothing in Asia to which their language bears 

 any relationship, their Asiatic origin must at best be viewed as doubtful. 



How the Languages Sound 



Many popular misconceptions are still prevalent as to the nature of 

 Indian languages. It is commonly supposed that they are characterized 

 by strange and harsh sounds such as " clicks " and " gutturals." On 

 examination the so-called clicks turn out to be nothing but a form of 1 

 produced more with one side of the tongue than the other and sounding 

 nearly like tl or hi. This sound is perfectly well known in "Welsh and 

 in many other languages of the old world. The guttural sounds also 

 are generally not abnormal, and often less conspicuous than in Hebrew 

 and Asiatic languages. As a rule we may state that no native Ameri- 

 can language possesses any sound formations that can not be exactly 

 paralleled and duplicated in one or more languages of the old world. 

 "What is more, it need hardly be said that among a thousand or more 

 languages and dialects there is opportunity for every range of variation, 

 and any attempt to characterize the phonetics of all Indian languages 

 by one term or by a single description must necessarily be fallacious. 

 As a matter of fact there are many forms of native speech that are ex- 

 ceedingly smooth, harmonious and pleasing even to English ears. On 

 the whole the American Indian finds English as full of strange sounds 

 and difficult sound-combinations as we think the Indian languages to 

 be when first we hear them. 



"Writing of Indian 



No American language was written in a native alphabet. So far as 

 the Indians possessed a means of visible communication, it was by pic- 



