NO. I
��NOTES ON ALGONQUIAN LANGUAGES
��57
��migration into Connecticut. The former theory is the more likely of the two." At the time, hardly more could be said. Since then, however, enough material has been gathered to definitely settle the question. The tables in my "Preliminary Report" show clearly that Canadian Abenaki and Natick do not belong closely together; and the evidence that Nar- ragansett linguistically belongs with Natick is quite conclusive. A few summers ago I was able to gather a few texts and a vocabulary of the Mohicans of the Hudson River region, which I hope will soon be published; and this new material, together with similar material published by Prince in Volume 7 of the "Anthropologist," N. S., establish firmly the conjecture of Prince and Speck that Pequot and Mohican are not closely related, though, as I shall show later on, Mohican is more closely related to Pequot than it is to Dela- ware-Munsee, contrary to the prevalent belief. I think the following facts prove that Mohegan-Pequot belongs with the Natick division of Central Algonquian languages: a
��sibilant is retained before k, q, but lost before a dental stop * (squaaw WOMAN ; metoog TREE) ; the inanimate plural ends in sh (nish THOSE) ; the verbal pronouns of the independent mode for I THEE are g sh (germeesh i GIVE THEE) ; the verbal pronoun of the imperative mode for the second person singular is a sibilant (beush COME, cowish GO TO SLEEP). These features are characteristic of Natick (see RBAE 28: 272-275; and Eliot, in the Mass. Hist. Soc. Coll., 2d ser., 9). From the scanty material available, it would seem that Mohegan-Pequot is a y dialect, thus agreeing with Narragansett, rather than a dialect in which n at times is totally eliminated, as Prince and Speck would have it. However, this is a minor point.
TRUMAN MICHELSON
BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY WASHINGTON, D. C.
1 Where a sibilant is retained before a dental stop, a medial vowel has been lost; e.g., wiistu HE MADE=FOX 'A'ci'tdw'; cf. Ojibwa uji TO MAKE. (The etymology of wiistu was previously unknown.)
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