Chasta Costa and the Dene languages of the North

• Main Author: Morice, A. G. (Adrien Gabriel), 1859-1938
• Language: English
• Published: American Anthropological Association 1915
• Subjects: Indians of North America > Canada; Northern > Languages; Indians of North America > Oregon > Languages; Athapascan languages; Chastacosta language; Chipewyan language; Canada; Chipewyan
• Online Access: http://cdm16085.contentdm.oclc.org/u?/p16085coll13,26613

GN1 .A5 14 From: American Anthropologist, Vol. 17, n.s, no. 3, 1915. p. 559-572. "All English scholars are familiar with the fact that the growth of a language is evidenced not only by the alterations in the material make-up, the morphology, of its component parts, but by the remarkable evolution which those parts occasionally undergo in their meaning while they remain unaltered in their structure . Likewise, instances of such alterations in the meaning of words are not wanting in American aboriginal philology, though said alterations may not be the result of time, but rather due to other circumstances such as, for instance, linguistic borrowing or changed cultural environment . In Dr. Sapir's "Notes on Chasta Costa Philology and Morphology," there are several terms or roots the meaning of which seems to have undergone an analogous transformation, through the action of time, contact with alien populations or the shifting of environment . Moreover, if, as is well known, the natural tendency of languages is to disintegrate with time their constitutive elements, that is, to pass from synthesis to analysis, the material presented to the public by Dr. Sapir . suffices to prove that the Chasta Costa dialect is much, less primitive, because more analytic, than the Dene idioms of the Canadian North"--P. 559,560,571 [1,2,13].