NO. 2
��TAKELMAN, KALAPUYAN, AND CHINOOKAN LEXICOGRAPHY
��175
��COMPARATIVE STUDIES IN TAKELMAN, KALAPUYAN
AND CHINOOKAN LEXICOGRAPHY
A PRELIMINARY PAPER
By LEO J. FRACHTENBERG INTRODUCTION
��THE last ten years or so have witnessed an almost feverish activity in the field of American Indian linguistics, culminating in more or less successful attempts to reclassify and to reduce the seemingly too great number of linguistic stocks that are found on the American continent north of Mexico. It is by no means accidental that these efforts should have commenced at such a late date. It must be borne in mind that the real stimulus to a comprehensive and intelligent study of the various American Indian languages, both ana- lytical and historical, came not from the writ- ings of the earlier students but through the activities of Powell and Boas, especially through the comparatively recent undertaking of the latter to compile and edit a handbook of American Indian languages. Consequently, during the last ten years more voluminous data have been made accessible, in the form of grammatical sketches, vocabularies, and texts, than during any other previous period. The wealth of the material presented by the vari- ous investigators resulted in the perfectly natural tendency to look for and to establish, wherever possible, genetic relationships be- tween the multiple linguistic stocks. Fur- thermore, it was perfectly natural that these reductive efforts should be applied to a field where the greatest multiplicity of stocks pre- vailed and where these stocks were observed to occupy a comparatively limited and, in most cases, continuous area. Two such areas,
1 Published with permission of the Smithsonian Institution.
��peculiarly adapted for investigations of this sort, were found: the Pacific Coast, and the region adjacent to the Gulf of Mexico; and regardless of the relative merits of the reduc- tions that have been thus far made in the lin- guistic stocks of these two areas, it seems un- likely that the enormous multiplicity of languages in these two littoral regions should be purely accidental.
The greatest diversity of aboriginal lan- guages obtains in California where, according to previous investigators, are found not less than twenty-one linguistic families, or over one-third of all languages known to have been spoken by the Indians north of Mexico. Con- sequently, the first efforts towards a possible reduction were made in the California area. In 1914 Dixon and Kroeber * presented evi- dence tending to show that the twenty-one languages of California may be reduced to twelve distinct stocks. They claimed that the Yokuts, Wintun, Costanoan, Maidu, and Miwok languages are reducible to one group, called the Penutian languages; that Karok, Chimariko, Shasta, Pomo, Esselen, Yana, and Yuman form another, the Hokan group; that Chumash and Salinan are related; and that Yurok and Wiyot had a common origin. Simultaneously with this announcement came Sapir's paper 3 attempting to demonstrate a genetic relationship between Wiyot, Yurok, and Algonkin. Before and after these reduc-
- New Linguistic Families in California (AANS, vol.
iv, no. 4, pp. 647-655).
- Wiyot and Yurok, Algonkin Languages of Califor-
nia (AANS, vol. xv, no. 4, pp. 617-646).
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