¹ See Language 10. 117-29 (1934).

² The study was made under the auspices of the Committee on Research in American Native Languages during the summers of 1932 and 1933.

³ Inconsistencies as to the form of particular words need not be mentioned here; for, although they added to the difficulty of ascertaining the phonemic composition of certain words, they do not affect the description of the separate phonemes.

⁴ This situation is not surprising in view of the fact that we have here two isolated survivals of the speech of a fairly large community. The differences may be traceable eventually to an original dialect differentiation when the Chitimacha dwelt in separate villages, or it may simply reflect differences such as are often to be found in fair-sized communities.

⁵ The glottal stop; if a convenient way of referring to this consonant is desired, it may be called ‘aleph’ after the Hebrew.

⁶ It was fairly easy to observe the syllabication even in running discourse. As an additional aid and check, the informant was asked to ‘divide the words’ and was given a few examples of what was desired. It is interesting to note that Benjamin always found ‘dividing the word’ difficult where a short vowel preceded a single consonant when the following syllable was ‘light’; his treatment in this case was usually not to make any division at such a point, saying therefore kit.kaŋ, čik.ne.mi, kap-nac.pikm.pa, etc. In dividing under other circumstances, he would sometimes make a fairly long pause between syllables when the preceding syllable was closed or ended in a long vowel; when the preceding syllable ended in a short vowel, the pause would always be very brief—this of course was to avoid giving the impression of a long vowel.

^6a In the discussion of syllabication a period is used to indicate the point of syllabic division when it falls between phonemes. In the cases where syllabic division falls within a consonant, this consonant is printed in roman type.

⁷ This is doubtless the basis for the independent statements of both my informants that Chitimacha is a gently spoken language, not to be spoken loudly as English.

⁸ Several dictaphone records of Chitimacha speech were made for the purpose of studying the tonal phenomena in detail.

⁹ Whatever relatively exact information is given here was supplied by Mary Haas Swadesh who has made a preliminary study of the tonal phenomena. She hopes to make a more complete study in the near future.

¹⁰ English and other examples given contain sounds that are similar, though not necessarily more than approximately similar, to the Chitimacha sounds under discussion.

^10a The open variety of i and of u is not quite so open as the English sounds given.

¹¹ This occurrence of a defective phoneme only in demonstratives parallels the similar limitation of initial Ð in English.