in the Nisqualli (a western Selish dialect), in Yákima, in Klamath, in Noce or Noze, and in Aztec. In De la Cuestas' Mutsun grammar, however, no mention is made of this synthetic feature.
The phonological facts, most generally observed throughout the coast lands, from Puget Sound to San Diego, are as follows: Absence of the labial sound F and of our rolling R (the guttural kh or χ is often erroneously rendered by r); comparative scarcity of the medial or soft mutes as initial and final consonants of words; frequency of the κ, or croaking, lingual k, identical with the c castañuelas of the South; sudden stops of the voice in the midst of a word or sentence; preponderance of clear and surd vowels over nasalized vowels. From all the information obtainable at present, we can properly infer that all the above mentioned peculiarities will by future investigations be discovered to exist also in many other tongues of our Pacific States. In the northern sections the consonantic elements predominate to an enormous degree, sometimes stifling the utterance of the vowels; many southern tongues, on the contrary, show a tendency towards vocalism, though the consonantic frame of the words is not in any instance disrupted or obliterated by the vocalic element, as we observe it in Polynesia. Languages, with a sonorous, sweet, soft, and vocalic utterance, and elementary vocalism, are the Mohave, Hualapai, Meewoc, Tuólumne and Wintoon (and Kalapuya further north), while the dialects of the Santa Barbara stock seem to occupy an intermediate position between the above and the Northern languages.
Unnumbered tongues have in the course of centuries disappeared from the surface of these Western lands, and no monuments speak to us of their extent, or give a glimpse at the tribes which used them. Many others are on the verge of extinction; they are doomed to expire under the overpowering influx of the white race. Other languages labor under the continued influence of linguistic corruption and intermixture with other stocks, and the Chinook jargon seems to make havoc among the tongues of the Columbia river. To transmit these languages to posterity in their unadulterated state, is not yet altogether impossible in the decennium in which we live, and would be a highly meritorious undertaking. It would be equivalent almost to rescuing these remarkable linguistic organisms from undeserved oblivion.
In the subsequent pages I attempt to give a synoptical survey of our Pacific language-stocks west of the Rocky Mountains (excluding the Pueblos of New Mexico and Arizona), based on the writings of such predecessors as George Gibbs, Latham, H.H. Bancroft, Stephen Powers,
