NO. 4
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��REVIEWS
��MASON, J. ALDEN. The Language of the Salinan Indians. University of California Publications in American Archaeology and Ethnology, vol. 14, no. i, pp. 1-154. Ber- keley, 1918.
Our previous knowledge of the language of the Salinan Indians, of southwestern California, had been embodied in Sitjar's not easily acces- sible " Vocabulary of the Language of San Antonio Mission, California " (Shea's Library of American Linguistics, 1861) and in a very brief sketch of Kroeber's published in 1904. The present work is another of those happily increasing studies for which future Americanists will be thankful, studies of aboriginal languages doomed to extinction within at most a few decades. Mason has in this volume given us the linguistic results of two field trips to Mon- terey County in 1910 and 1916, besides a convenient summary of the older material con- tained in Sitjar. The whole makes a very useful compendium of the language in both its extant dialects, Antoniano and Migueleno. To the treatment of the phonology (pp. 7-17) and of the morphology (pp. 18-58) are added a series of twenty-seven Antoniano and eleven Migue- leno texts with both interlinear and free trans- lations (pp. 59-1 20) and a systematic vocabulary of all extant Salinan words (pp. 121-154). The handling of the language, which is characterized by considerable irregularity, is competent. A number of obscure or imperfectly analyzed features remain, but these are as much due to the fragmentary nature of our material as to any shortcomings on the part of the author. The language is moderately synthetic in struc- ture, with a drift towards analytic methods.
��Mason's treatment of the Salman phonetic system, as a system and without regard to sound relationships, is eminently satisfactory and shows considerable grounding in general phonetics. It is refreshingly unlike the ama- teurish sound surveys that have generally done duty in American linguistics for " phonetics ". The description of a (p. 7) as " mid-mixed- narrow ", however, is an error, probably an oversight ; a is a " back ", not a " mixed " vowel. Less satisfactory are Mason's contribu- tions to the phonology of Salinan. For purposes of linguistic comparison it is important to know not so much the distinctive sounds found, in their various nuances, in a given language, as the irreducible set of organically, or better etymologically, distinct sounds with which one has to operate. Thus, to say that two lan- guages both possess a given sound, say x, is not even suggestive unless we know that the status of the x is analogous, in other words, that it is in both a primary consonant or secon- darily derived from an identical source. From this standpoint Mason, like most Americanists, leaves something to be desired. It is not alto- gether easy to be clear, for instance, from his data whether the aspirated surds are an orga- nically independant series or merely a secondary development of the intermediate-surds. The former is the impression conveyed in the pho- netic portion of the paper, the latter as the data unfold themselves in the body of the work. In other words, it would seem that the Yana-Pomo-Shastan-Chimariko organic diffe- rentiation, say, of older k and k' has been obli- terated (or never developed) in Salinan and that Salinan k', and apparently often x, are but secondary developments of k (leveled or
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