Ebook: Classification of Iroquoian Radicals with Subjective Pronominal Prefixes

Ottawa: Government Printing Bureau, 1915. [2], 30 p. (Canada Department of Mines. Geological Survey. No7, Anthropological Series, Memoir 46)The aim of the present paper is to indicate the determining factor in this classification of radicals into several conjugations. Although no explicit reason has yet apparently been advanced accounting for this rigid sorting of the stems into several conjugations, Marcoux, Cuoq, and Boas indicate by their treatment of the pronominal prefixes that they must have found it impossible to lay down the principle, whether pertaining to the history or to the phonetic requirements of the language, which is at the basis of this classification of stems. The pronominal elements, as tabulated in the paradigms published by these authors, are always immediately followed by one of several vowels standing between the pronoun and the stem.
For the preparation of the present paper, Cuoq's and Boas' Mohawk and Oneida studies have been utilized comparatively with the Wyandot linguistic data collected by myself, in the course of a season's field work among the Wyandots of Oklahoma, in 1912. To Dr. 'Edward Sapir I am indebted for his kind advice on the method followed while recording the linguistic data in the field, and especially for his collaboration in the study of the comparative phonetics and grammar of the Mohawk, Oneida, and Wyandot dialects.