John P. Harrington

Sibilants in Ventureño

0. The late John P. Harrington (18841961) was a tireless collector of ethnographic and linguistic data from many native American peoples; for more than fifty years his fieldwork, most of it supported by the Bureau of American Ethnology of the Smithsonian Institution, was maintained without interruption, and detailed and meticulous records were kept of everything. He was an unusually accurate phonetician, and the copious recordings he made of numerous languages now extinct will prove to be invaluable. Of his vast corpus relatively little has been published.3 As far as we know, all his papers are now in the custody either of the National Anthropological Archives or of the Department of Linguistics, University of California, Berkeley (materials on loan from NAA). Their ordering, editing, and prepar-

Three Kiowa Texts

0. The following texts are from the late Delos K. Lonewolf and from his stepson, Paul McKenzie, both of them native speakers of Kiowa. The Kiowa Indian language is now spoken at and about Anadarko, Oklahoma; an earlier home may have been several hundred miles northwest: Mooney traced back Kiowa tribal history to occupancy of a part of the region of the headwaters of the Missouri River, in what is now the vicinity of the Yellowstone National Park. Kiowa stories have no definite titles, but for purpose of ready identification titles have been put on these.

Matako of the Gran Chaco

1. Matako is one of the languages of the Gran Chaco of South America, spoken in the central part of this region. The language is genetically related either to the languages of the Guaykuruan linguistic stock or to those of the Guaranian linguistic stock. Abundant traces of male language and female language survive in the Matako language of today. The sounds, structure, and a considerable part of the vocabulary of Matako are similar to those of Guarani. The eight distinct vowels of Matako occur short only, just as the Guarani vowels occur short only. There is in Matako no nasalized series of vowels. There appear to be something like 24 consonants in Matako. The verb is noncommittal as to tense, tense being marked by a temporal adverb. A curious third person passive has developed in Matako, in which passiveness, person, and number are marked by a single prefixed syllable. Some nouns form their plural by the addition of -s; other nouns require other plural formations. The ordinary verb form is a complete sentence,

Three Tewa Texts

0. The following Tewa texts are by Eduardo Cata, an educated San Juan Tewa Indian, who is a talented musician as well as a native speaker of the San Juan dialect of the Tewa language, and much interested in the pitch of Tewa syllables. The Tewa dialect of the pueblo of San Juan is the most northerly dialect of northern Tewa and is historically the most important Tewa dialect. The stories are told in the same styles in which Cata heard them. The first was told to Eduardo Cata by Juan Cata, paternal grandfather of Eduardo Cata; the second was told to Eduardo Cata by an old man; the third by an old woman.

Boas on the Science of Language

brought out many points of common interest because each of us had done long field work with American Indian languages. Our discussions centered upon the science of language,-what is more recently becoming known as linguistics. To Boas, the science of language was a branch of sociology, or more inclusively of anthropology. And in this linguistic division, Boas was more adept and interested than in any other branch of anthropology, not only according to his own statement, but also according to what Elsie Clews Parsons told me: Boas was primarily a linguist. It is interesting that starting in natural science and embracing the great realm of anthropology as few men ever have, Boas stated openly that his mind focused chiefly on language, and his publications prove this. Boas once told me, Sometimes I dont feel like working. But he added with a roguish look, When I work, it is preferably with languages. To Boas, human language was the most important phenomenon to study in social science because language is the most detailed expression of mans behavior. Language is the very core of custom, religion, and all that distinguishes man. Boas was fond of mentioning language and ethnology in one breath. A language is only part of anthropological phenomena in general, he would reiterate. It would be absurd to think that a man with an unusually keen perception like that of Boas did not realize that each language operates with a certain set of contrastive and distinctive sounds, which can be de-

Yunka, Language of the Peruvian Coastal Culture

1. Yunka, in spite of what various writers have said, is like Quechua in many features and vocables. The present description is for the purpose of giving an idea of the structure of the language, which is culturally important next to Quechua and of which there has been no modern exposition. A comparison of the Yunka language with Quechua has been made, but the present paper is entirely divorced from comparative material. The languages of the Inca Empire are usually enumerated as four: Quechua, Aimara, Uru and Yunka. The Inca sovereigns are said to have had a more or less secret language used among themselves, but their everyday speech to the populace and the native tongue of the Cuzco region of what is now Peru was Quechua, a language still spoken by several million people and known preeminently to have been the main linguistic form of the Incas. The Aimara language, genetically related to Quechua, continues to be spoken on the southern shores of Lake Titicaca and a large part of the southernmost coast region of Peru and a part of northern Chile. Aimara is the old Quechua form of the name of the Aimara tribe and language. What is given as the third language of the Empire is the heralded Uru, now to be heard spoken chiefly in the Desaguadero region south of Titicaca Lake. The Puquian language, written up generations ago by one of the early padres, has some words in common with Uru and is probably a divergent form of Uru. In Quechua uru mean spider, but is also the tribal and linguistic