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The theory of "borrowing" seems totally inadequate to explain those fundamental features of structure, hidden away in the very core of the linguistic complex, that have been pointed out as common, say, to Semitic and Hamitic, to the various Soudanese languages, to Malayo-Polynesian and Mon-Khmer and Munda, to Athabaskan and Tlingit and Haida.
In the Athabaskan group many verbs change the quality or quantity of the vowel of the radical element as it changes its tense or mode. In another Indian language, Yokuts , vocalic modifications affect both noun and verb forms. Consonantal change as a functional process is probably far less common than vocalic modifications, but it is not exactly rare.
Among the most primitive peoples of aboriginal America, the Athabaskan tribes of the Mackenzie River speak languages in which such words seem to be nearly or entirely absent, while they are used freely enough in languages as sophisticated as English and German. Such an instance shows how little the essential nature of speech is concerned with the mere imitation of things.
The majority of the tribes in Manitoba and the Northwest the Crees and Blackfeet belong to the Algonquin race, and the Assiniboines or Stonies, to the Dacotahs or Sioux, now only found on the other side of the frontier. The Tinneh or Athabaskan family occupy the Yukon and Mackenzie valleys, while in the Arctic region are the Eskimo or Innuits.
On the other hand, there are languages, like the Bantu group of Africa or the Athabaskan languages of North America, in which the grammatically significant elements precede, those that follow the radical element forming a relatively dispensable class.
But although nowadays so much associated with the far north and north-west of America, the Athabaskan group evidently came from a region much farther south, and has been cut in half by other tribal movements, wars, and migrations; for the Athapaskan family also includes the Apaches and the Navaho of the south-western portions of the United States and the adjoining territories of Mexico.
There are many excellent examples in aboriginal America. The Athabaskan languages form as clearly unified, as structurally specialized, a group as any that I know of. The cultural adaptability of the Athabaskan-speaking peoples is in the strangest contrast to the inaccessibility to foreign influences of the languages themselves.
The psychological contrast between English and German as regards the treatment of foreign material is a contrast that may be studied in all parts of the world. The Athabaskan languages of America are spoken by peoples that have had astonishingly varied cultural contacts, yet nowhere do we find that an Athabaskan dialect has borrowed at all freely from a neighboring language.
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