HOLMES ANNIVERSARY VOLUME 



writers have not discovered such a distinction; and it is surely due 

 to a leading question. The term given means "my sister's husband" 

 with male speaker. The word given for "my sister-in-law" suffers 

 from similar errors. The term given for "my second cousin" is due 

 to an error of some sort: nimp'sa doubtless corresponds to Michelson's 

 ni'm e sa ea , for the meaning of which see below. The term given for 

 "my uncle" is correct according to Michelson's information, but 

 according to Wissler it is not. The words given for the following are 

 certainly correct: my grandfather, my grandmother, my father-in- 

 law, my mother-in-law, my son, my daughter, my son-in-law, my 

 wife, my husband. Grinnell is quite right in stating that cousins are 

 the same as brothers and sisters; but owing to the errors noted above, 

 naturally the same errors would reappear. Summing up, we must say 

 that Grinnell's work does not show much advance on Morgan's. In 

 a popular book we naturally should not expect a discussion of dis- 

 crepancies with other writers. 



Coming now to the work of Wissler. In the first place, in a strictly 

 scientific paper we should have expected Wissler to take full account 

 of discrepancies between his own statements and those of previous 

 writers. Secondly we should have expected a rather more complete 

 account than we actually have. The phonetics are inadequate, but 

 this rarely has completely disguised words. Wissler's arrangement of 

 his material is good. The present writer ventures but rarely to 

 criticize Wissler's terms with female speaker, owing to the male sex 

 of his own informants. The term nikso'stak 1 is given with the meaning, 

 with male speaker, "my mother and her sisters; wives of my elder 

 brothers, brothers of my father and of my mother". The word cor- 

 responds to Michelson's niksi' 'sta ca , and Morgan, Grinnell, Tims, 

 Curtis, and Uhlenbeck record an i in the second syllable. Michelson 

 has recorded this word with the meaning of "my mother, my mother's 

 sisters". According to his information no distinction is made between 

 "my elder brother's wife" and "my younger brother's wife"; and as 

 Morgan also does not, it should be left an open question as to whether 

 Piegan actually makes such a distinction. According to Michelson 

 nicinnaua's is a mishearing for nitsi'na^axs, which has the meaning 

 assigned by Wissler to the former. As pointed out by Uhlenbeck, 

 the differences between ni'nst ni'nsta, naa' x sa naa' x s are not due to 

 the sex of the speaker, but to difference of case. According to Michel- 

 son the meaning of ni'nst is rather more extended than given by 

 Wissler, and includes also elder daughters of my father's and mother's 

 sisters. The word naa' x s, according to the former, includes also my 



1 See Uhlenbeck in Internal. Archivf. Elhnographie, XX, 205. 



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