NO. I
��REVIEWS
��81
��late to this scheme more readily than recog- nize and record as distinctive elements sounds not already provided for. For this reason the new phonetic scheme adopted by a committee of the American Anthropological Association, and recently published in the "Miscellaneous Collections of the Smithsonian Institution," l is timely, and, let us hope, adequate. I believe that the Bureau cannot do better than adopt it as the standard alphabet for its future publications. While a fetich should not be made of uniformity in orthographic matters, I do not think it is altogether wise to indulge in too many individual vagaries. It is in morphology that I think the Bureau has done its most valuable linguistic work. Chiefly under the enthusiastic guidance of Boas, we have presented to us in Nos. 48-59 (other sketches, such as Kutenai, Alsea, Siuslaw, and Paiute, are to follow) an excel- lent set of descriptive analyses of the struc- tures of several Indian languages. How excellent, on the whole, they are, may be best gathered by contrasting them with the con- ventional grammatical treatment with a Latin bias, that we find in so many of the older Indian grammars (No. 47 is not alto- gether free from this bias). "The Handbook of American Indian Languages" is, indeed, easily the most significant linguistic achieve- ment of the Bureau; taking it all in all, it probably marks the crest up to the present of research in American Indian linguistics, and at the same time constitutes one of the really important monuments to Boas's versatility as anthropologist. It would be idle to pretend that all are equally good, or that any one, indeed, is altogether perfect. Many valid criticisms could be made of all or most of them; but they certainly do succeed, for all that, in giving a vivid picture of the exuberant
1 rhonetic Transcription of Indian Languages, Report of Committee of American Anthropological Association (Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections, vol. 66, no. 6, 1916), 15 pp. and 2 tables.
��variety and distinctiveness of American Indian linguistic morphology. To the lin- guistic psychologist and to the comparative philologist alike it is certainly something very like an aesthetic delight to have clearly revealed to him, for instance, two such unique linguistic organisms as those described in Nos. 48 and 51.
One cannot with such enthusiastic affirma- tion answer the third of our leading questions. Nos. 60 and 63 are really studies in linguistic geography and classification rather than in comparative philology proper, though they constitute a necessary preliminary to the latter type of investigation. No. 61 is a purely negative and rather fruitless type of linguistic research; while No. 62, despite its more positive outlook, is too hesitating and incomplete a presentation of evidence to merit unqualified praise. This leaves No. 64 as the only really serious work yet undertaken by the Bureau in comparative linguistics; and even this, valuable as it is, is too restricted in scope to mark a very notable advance. The truth is, that the Bureau has not yet fairly reached the comparative stage of linguistic work, but is still, and for quite some time to come necessarily will be, mainly concerned with purely descriptive labors. Nevertheless, I do not believe that this almost total lack of emphasis on comparative work is altogether due to the fact that so much remains to be done in the amassing of lexical and text materials and in the analysis of individual morphologies. Comparative work in linguis- tics, if it is to be of any scientific value, re- quires a keenly sensitive historical conscious- ness in the handling of linguistic phenomena. It is precisely the historical interpretation of cultural elements, however, that has up to the recent past been most conspicuously absent in Americanistic work. The lack of linguistic studies of a comparative nature is merely a symptom of this general defect.
E. SAPIR.
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