Volume 1

Handbook of American Indian languages / by Franz Boas ; with illustrative sketches by Roland B. Dixon ... [and others].

  • Franz Boas
Date:
1911-
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: Handbook of American Indian languages / by Franz Boas ; with illustrative sketches by Roland B. Dixon ... [and others]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    87/1088 page 75
    ative; t- I; Vtkar^ dirt; -pit to dig [rp in contact, form ‘w]); or the Oneida g-nagla‘-sl-i-zaTc-s i search for a village {g- I; -rMgla‘ to live; -si- abstract noun; -i- verbal character; -zak to search; -s continuative). A more thorough knowledge of the structure of many American languages shows that the general designation of all these languages as polysynthetic and incorporating is not tenable. We have m Amer- ica a sufficiently large number of cases of languages in which the pronouns are not incorporated, hut joined loosely to the verb, and we also have numerous languages in which the incorporation of many elements into a single word hardly occurs at all. Among the lan- guages treated here, the Chinook may be given as an example of lack of polysynthesis. There are very few, if any, cases in which a single Chinook word expresses an extended complex of ideas, and we notice particularly that there are no large classes of ideas which are expressed in such form that they may be considered as subordinate. An examination of the structure of the Chinook grammar will show that each verbal stem appears modified only by pronominal and a few adverbial elements, and that nouns show hardly any tendency to incorporate new ideas such as are expressed by our adjectives. On the other hand, the Athapascan and the Haida and Tlingit may be taken as examples of languages which, though polysynthetic in the sense here described, do not readily incorporate the object, but treat both pronominal subject and pronominal object as independent ele- ments. Among the languages of northern North America, the Iroquois alone has so strong a tendency to incorporate the nominal object into the verb, and at the same time to modify so much its independent form, that it can be considered as one of the characteristic languages that incorjiorate the object. To a lesser extent this trait belongs also to the Tsimshian, Kutenai, and Shoshone. It is strongly developed in the Caddoan languages. All the other incorjiorating languages treated here, like the Eskimo, Algonquian, and Kwakiutl, confine them- selves to a more or less close incorporation of the pronominal object. In Shoshone, the incorporation of the pronominal object and of the nominal object is so weak that it is almost arbitrary whether we consider these forms as incorporated or not. If we extend our view over other parts of America, the same facts appear clearl}’-, and it is not possible to consider these two traits as characteristics of all American languages.
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