26 
conversation. Sometimes they preserved, too, archaic grammatical 
forms, like the use of “ thou ” in the hjnglish churches. More 
strange to Europeans were the slight differences in speech between 
men and women, that appeared in a few languages. These were 
sometimes mere flifferences of vocabulary, certain words being used 
by women only; but in Siouan and in the Eskimo dialect of Baffin 
island there were also slight differences in grammatical forms. 
The most musical of all the Indian languages was Algonkian, 
owing to its richness in vowel sounds and its avoidance of the harsher 
consonants. It had a fondness for wliispered syllables, h. and a voice- 
less w (like ivh in v)hile) occurring very commonly as terminations; 
glottal stops between vowels, though not uncommon, were never 
stressed, and there were few of the glottalizcfl consonants ( i.c., con- 
sonants pronounced with a momentary stop]>ing of the breath) that 
were so frequent in other Indian languages. In striking contrast was 
. the exceeding liarshness of the Salishan dialects of British Columbia, 
which not only abounded in harsh consonants like k and g, frequently 
glottalized, but combined two and often three consonants, for 
example, khn and pts (with perhaps the k and the p glottalized), 
which in European languages would be separated by vowels. The 
Athapaskan dialects were less harsh than the Salishan, but more 
difficult and elusive on account of the complexity of the prefixes and 
suffixes, the vagueness of the stems, the numerous vowel and conson- 
antal changes, and the use of tonal .systems that varied from one 
tribe to another. i\thai)askan was perhaps the most difficult of all 
the Indian tongues, nearly every one of which would seem difficult 
if compared with Ei-ench or German among European languages. 
The presence of many distinct languages in Canada seems to have 
proved no great barrier to tribal contacts, to the spread of cultural 
elements, or even to the formation of political alliances between 
groups of difl’erent speech. Thus a moi’e or less uniform culture 
prevailed all along the Pacific coast, despite the diversity of languages 
in that region. The Sarcee and the Cree, both immigrants to the 
plains, preserved their respective languages when they adopted the 
culture of the older plains’ tribes. In the east, the Hurons allied 
themselves with their Algonkian neighbours against their own kins- 
men, the Iroquois proper. Nearly every tribe, indeed, absorberl 
through marriage or warfare a few members of some neighbouring 
