Franz Boas read this paper before the American Philosophical Society in October 1891, and it was printed in the Society’s Proceedings the following January. It is not a treatise or a narrative but a working lexicon: three parallel word lists—English–Tlingit (Stikeen dialect), English–Haida (Skidegate dialect), and English–Tsimshian—compiled while Boas was studying the tribes of British Columbia for a committee of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. The committee had decided to publish only a brief comparative vocabulary in its report, so Boas brought out the fuller lists separately, on the conviction that the languages of the North Pacific Coast were so little known that even raw word lists had value. The paper also carries a short Tsimshian narrative, three prayers, a satirical song, and a Tlingit–English vocabulary running from E to Y.
The Alphabet and the Committee’s Charge
Boas opens with the practical apparatus of the field linguist. He explains that the vocabularies were gathered under appointment of a Committee of the British Association formed to investigate the physical characters, languages, and industrial and social conditions of the Northwestern tribes of the Dominion of Canada. Because the Committee chose to print only a brief comparative list, Boas offers the fuller material here. He then sets out his transcription: vowels carry continental values (a as in father, e as in mate, i as in machine, o as in note, u as in rule), with extra signs for the German ö and ü, for a as aw in law, and for e as in flower. Among the consonants, g’ and kh’ are very guttural, like gr and kr; q is the German ch in Bach; u the German ch in ich; Q lies between g and H; c is sh in shore; ¢ is th in thin; td is an explosive dorso-apical t; dl a palatal dorsal l; and a following consonant marks the u position of the organs. This is the key that unlocks every page that follows.
Tlingit: Compounds That Explain Themselves
The English–Tlingit list of the Stikeen dialect runs from A to Y, and its interest lies less in one-to-one glosses than in the compounds Boas records beside them. An aurora is “fire like out of doors color”; lightning is “thunder bird opens his eyes”; a liar is a “mouth play master,” a thief a “stealing master,” a warrior a “fighting master.” Bad is simply “not good,” and an arrow is noted as “moving straight.” Borrowings are flagged—cat and horse from Chinook—and dialect variants from Chilkat and Sitka are set alongside the Stikeen forms.
Haida: Kinship Drawn Fine
The Haida list of the Skidegate dialect begins with a note that words followed by “K.” belong to the Kaigani dialect, and it marks borrowings from Tlingit in the same way. Here the compounds are just as telling: an ancestor is “long ago my grandfather,” a bed a “sleep instrument,” a beetle “face dirt.” But the Haida pages are most exact about kinship. Cousin (sk’at) is defined precisely as the father’s sister’s and mother’s brother’s daughter; usqu/n is the mother’s brother’s child; lkra/n the father’s sister’s and mother’s brother’s son. The mother’s sister’s child and the father’s brother’s son are both called “brother,” with elder or younger brother used according to relative age. Terms for nephews distinguish whether a man or a woman is speaking and whether the child is of a brother or a sister. The moon’s phases are recorded as “the moon opens his eyes” for the first crescent, and “begins to be full.” Among the animals, the dragon fly is glossed “sun louse” and marked as borrowed from Tsimshian, as is a second dragon-fly term; crane, humming-bird, fur seal, and Fucus vesiculosus are marked as Tlingit borrowings.
Tsimshian Words and the Monster of the Raven
The English–Tsimshian section opens with “above” and works through entries such as “to adopt,” glossed “make relative,” and “again,” explained as “perfect sense (1) then (2).” Asuwalgyat is described as a fabulous monster belonging to the gens K-an-ha/da, raven; cannibal is glossed “eat people (Olala),” and canoe is set beside the Haida canoe with a note of the Haida form.
The Chief’s Daughter and the Snail Husband
The Tsimshian texts begin with a narrative titled “Wulaqtlatk (where a misfortune happened by a landslide), Inverness.” A chief was very particular about whom his daughter should marry. A nice young man comes secretly at night and persuades her to elope; she consents. They reach his house, where he makes her stand outside while he enters, and his mother and father ask whether he went to get his “dear.” His sisters run out and bring her inside, and they eat with good hearts. In the morning a little old person, Female Mouse (Ksemwuts’enga), comes and tells the chief’s daughter to burn her earring; she does so, and the old woman takes it from the fire. Asked whether she knows who took her there, the girl says no, and the old woman answers: “The snail” (Hatsanreldrt). The girl is very afraid. Female Mouse tells her to run away—not far—to where her parents stay, walking invisibly on the road behind the house, going downward where there is slime, then up the mountain and over to the beach where her parents camp. The girl pretends after a while to go out, but runs and tells the little old person. Her husband misses her, knows she has escaped, calls together his great tribe, and they pursue. At the top of the mountain she hears a great noise and guesses they are after her; running down, she looks back and sees a great landslide coming—trees and great rocks rolling down. She screams, sees where her parents stay, orders them into the canoes; they finish embarking and she too gets into her father’s canoe. She is safe, but where they had been a great landslide has fallen, and looking back they see that many snails made it happen. She tells why it happened, and the place is Inverness—”where a landslide-misfortune happened.”
Prayers to Neqnoq and a Mocking Song
Three prayers follow, addressed to “Neqno’q, Neqno’q,” called chief, asking mercy, asking him to look down on his people, to pull up his foot and sweep off his face; the second adds “else nobody” as the one to make him receive smoke. A note explains that before dinner the Tsimshian burn some food as an offering for Neqnoq, then pray, addressing the chief to eat this part of their food left here, all left to his child, and to give them food; a footnote records that instead of “nts’a/pent” the recorder also heard “nEsEgya’tent,” “your people made by you.” Then comes a satirical song, “Mocking the Inhabitants of Meqtlakqatla,” sung while grating with Mr. Duncan to Alaska, with the refrain “Oyeya, oyeya”: lines telling someone not to be homesick, asking when they will leave and when they will be a Tongas woman; that they will send only a present of preserved berries kept in a grease bag of sea-lion guts; not to cry, because they left Caledonia behind; when they will have eaten rotten salmon heads; and not to be foolish.
The Tlingit Lexicon from E to Y
The bulk of the final stretch is a Tlingit–English vocabulary running E through Y, with plural forms, dialect notes (Nass, Gyitksan), borrowings from Tlingit, Kwakiutl, Chinook, and Heiltsuk, and the same habit of analysis. A fathom is gait, half a fathom k’ayek, “breast”; a fireplace is “in fire”; fish derives from “in water”; a European flag is “sail sun”; the Flatheads are “the flat ones”; foolish is mewatsa, where watsa is the land otter; a girl is a “little woman” or “without labret”; glad is “in good heart”; god is “chief above”; a knife is an “instrument smoothing,” a butcher knife analyzed as instrument, to cut, meat; the moon is the “sun of night”; a mosquito is a “piercer”; the olachen is a “saviour”; overcast is “close eye heaven”; a river is “ascending water”; the sky is “in above”; thunder is “thunderbird in heaven”; the tide rises when “it grows the water”; twins come from “two”; the windpipe is a “speaking instrument”; woman is hanalaq. Kinship terms again distinguish sister’s and brother’s calls, and the section closes with the heading “TSIMSHIAN TEXTS.”
What the Word Lists Carry
Read as a whole, the paper is an argument by accumulation: that a language’s way of seeing the world survives in its compounds. The Tlingit and Haida entries are miniature descriptions—lightning as a bird opening its eyes, the moon as the sun of night, a liar as a mouth-play master—and the kinship terms, drawn with a precision that separates father’s sister’s daughter from mother’s brother’s child, show how much social structure a vocabulary can hold. The Tsimshian texts add another register: a folktale in which a snail husband’s pursuit ends in the landslide that names a place, prayers that treat the chief above as a guest at the meal, and a mocking song about homesickness and rotten salmon heads. Boas’s paper is a primary document of North Pacific Coast languages at the moment a professional anthropologist began recording them, and its value lies exactly where he said it did: in the fullness of the lists, set down before the speakers and the speech had changed.
