264 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST [N. s. f 22, 1920
relative; nor, reciprocally, is the child-in-law's brother or sister a relative.
4. Relatives by affinity continue to be called by the same terms
after the death of the connecting link. Thus, a man's brother-in-
law (wife's brother) is termed q'a(
language characters)ä(language characters)n even after his wife's death.
This again is contrary to the custom of many western American
Indian tribes.
II. LINGUISTIC COMMENTS
A few linguistic remarks are possible, though, for the most part, the terms do not yield to any far-reaching linguistic analysis. Most striking is the employment of distinctive vocatives. In most cases (nos. 1, 4, 7, 10, 11 12, 13, 16, 17, 18, 19, 25) the vocative is merely the noun stem, unprovided with a possessive suffix. In a considerable number of cases, however, the vocative is different from the noun stem. Sometimes the vocative is etymologically unrelated to it (nos. 5, 7a, 7b, perhaps also 14), more often it is a shorter or otherwise modified form of the stem (nos. 2, 3, 6, 8, 9). A number of nouns beginning with nd- (m-, n-) lose this element in the vocative (nos. 2, 3, 8, 9). It is probable that this prefix occurs also in the term for "father" (no. 5); possibly also in that for "mother" (no. 6).
The etymology of the n- prefix is quite obscure, as there seem
to be no obvious analogies in the formative elements of either Nass
or Tsimshian proper ascertained by Boas. It may be an old classificatory prefix for terms of relationship, now preserved only in four
or five terms. Possibly, however, it is the subjective first person
singular pronominal prefix n- "I" (e.g., (language characters) "I say so,"
contrast de'-ya "he says so"; see Boas, op. cit., 53), originally
characterizing, it may be, terms of relationship as contrasted with
other nouns. In that case such a form as (language characters) "grandfather"
would originally have meant "my grandfather," only secondarily,
as the use of the w-prefix in a possessive pronominal sense became
obsolete, "grandfather." The use of the first personal singular
possessive pronominal suffix -t' in such terms of relationship would
be due to the analogy of the vast majority of nouns. At any rate,.
