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More justifiable would be a classification according to the formal processes most typically developed in the language. The latter type might be not inaptly termed "symbolic" languages. The affixing languages would naturally subdivide themselves into such as are prevailingly prefixing, like Bantu or Tlingit, and such as are mainly or entirely suffixing, like Eskimo or Algonkin or Latin.
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 British Columbia the Indians used to go out to meet the first fish as they came up the river: "They paid court to them, and would address them thus: 'You fish, you fish; you are all chiefs, you are; you are all chiefs." Amongst the Tlingit of Alaska the first halibut of the season is carefully handled and addressed as a chief, and a festival is given in his honour, after which the fishing goes on.
Seclusion of girls at puberty among the Indians of California, 41-43; among the Indians of Washington State, 43; among the Nootka Indians of Vancouver Island, 43 sq.; among the Haida Indians of the Queen Charlotte Islands, 44 sq.; among the Tlingit Indians of Alaska, 45 sq.; among the Tsetsaut and Bella Coola Indians of British Columbia, 46 sq.; among the Tinneh Indians of British Columbia, 47 sq.; among the Tinneh Indians of Alaska, 48 sq.; among the Thompson Indians of British Columbia, 49-52; among the Lillooet Indians of British Columbia, 52 sq.; among the Shuswap Indians of British Columbia, 53 sq.; among the Delaware and Cheyenne Indians, 54 sq.; among the Esquimaux, 55 sq.
Not until the eighteenth century, when Russian traders began to frequent the Pacific coast and the Spanish and English pushed their voyages into the North Pacific, the Tlingit of the far north, the Salish, Tsimshian, Haida, Kwakiutl-Nootka and Kutenai. It is thought, however, that nearly all the Pacific Indians belong to one kindred stock.
Among the nontotemic Kurnai of Southeast Australia there are animal patrons of the sexes and of shamans and other individuals. In like manner the shamans of the Pacific Coast Haidas and Tlingit have their guardians, and sometimes secret societies are similarly provided; in the winter ceremonies of the Kwakiutl the youth is supposed to be possessed by the patron of the society to which he belongs.
In aboriginal America also pitch accent is known to occur as a grammatical process. A good example of such a pitch language is Tlingit, spoken by the Indians of the southern coast of Alaska.
The southernmost Eskimo of Alaska were assimilated in culture to their Tlingit neighbors.
It seems to me that there is a rather important psychological distinction between a language that settles the formal status of a radical element before announcing it and this, in effect, is what such languages as Tlingit and Chinook and Bantu are in the habit of doing and one that begins with the concrete nucleus of a word and defines the status of this nucleus by successive limitations, each curtailing in some degree the generality of all that precedes.
They and their almost equally advanced Tlingit and Tsimshian neighbors on the mainland displayed much mechanical skill, especially in canoe-building, woodcarving, and the working of stone and copper, as well as in making blankets and baskets. To this day they earn a considerable amount of money by selling their carved objects of wood and slate to traders and tourists.
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