The strongest evidence for a community of origin of the Maskoki tribes is furnished by the fact that their dialects belong to one linguistic family. The numerous incorporations of foreign elements have not been able to alter the purity of their language; the number of intrusive words is very small, and the grammar has repelled every foreign intrusion. This is the inference we draw from their best studied dialects, for with some of them, as with Ábika, we are not acquainted at all, and with others very imperfectly. The principal dialects of the family greatly differ from each other; Cha'hta, for instance, is unintelligible to the Creek, Koassáti and Hitchiti people, and the speech of each of these three tribes is not understood by the two others. When Albert Gallatin published his vocabularies of Cha'hta and Creek, he was uncertain at first whether they were related to each other or not. On the other side, the difference between Cha'hta and Chicasa, and between Creek and Seminole, is so insignificant that these dialects may be considered as practically identical. The degree of dialectic difference points approximately to the date of the separation of the respective communities, and untold centuries must have elapsed since the two main branches of the family were torn asunder, for Cha'hta differs about as much from Creek as the literary German does from Icelandic.
THE COMMON MASKOKI LANGUAGE.
Although the dialects of Maskoki do not now diverge from each other more than did the Semitic dialects two thousand years ago, the time when they all had a common language, or, in other words, the time preceding the separation into four divisions must lie further back than eight or ten thousand years. We cannot expect to reconstruct the parent Maskoki language spoken at that time but very imperfectly, since the oldest text known to exist in any of the dialects dates from A. D. 1688 only. An approach to its reconstruction could be attempted by carefully comparing the lexicon and grammatic forms of the dialects presently spoken, and an individual acquainted with them all, or at least with their four representatives, might also compose a comparative grammar of these dialects as spoken at the present epoch of their development, which would reveal many points concerning the ancient or historic shape of the language once common to all these tribes.
What the Maskoki dialects presently spoken, as far as published, have in common, may be stated in a general way in the following outlines:
Phonetics.—The dialects possess the sound f and the palatalized l (`l), but lack th, v and r, while nasalization of the vocalic element is more peculiar to the western than to the eastern divisions. There is a tendency to pronounce the mutes or checks by applying the tongue to the alveolar part of the palate. The phonetic system is as follows:
| EXPLOSIVES: | BREATHS: | |||||
| Not aspirated | Aspirated. | Spirants. | Nasals. | Trills. | ||
| Gutturals | k | g | χ | h | ||
| Palatals | tch, ts | dsh, ds | y | ń | `l | |
| Linguals | k´ | g´ | sh | l | ||
| Dentals | t | d | s | n | ||
| Labials | p | b | f | w | m | |
| Vowels:—i, e, ā, a, o, u; with their long and nasalized sounds. | ||||||
The syllable is quite simple in its structure; it consists either of a vowel only, or begins with one consonant (in the eastern division with one or two), and ends in a vowel. Deviations from this rule must be explained by phonetic alteration, elision, etc. The frequent occurrence of homonymous terms forms a peculiar difficulty in the study of the dialects.
Morphology.—No thorough distinction exists between the different parts of speech, none especially between the nominal and the verbal element. The fact that all adjectives can be verbified, could be better expressed as follows: The adjectives used attributively are participles of attributive verbs and inflected for number like these, their so-called plural being the plural form of a verb. This we observe in Iroquois, Taensa and many other American languages; it also explains the position of the adjective after the noun qualified. Some forms of the finite verb represent true verbs, while others, like the Creek forms, with tcha-, tchi-, pu-, etc., prefixed, which is the possessive pronoun, are nominal forms, and represent nomina agentis and nomina actionis. The three cases of the noun are not accurately distinguished from each other in their functions; substantives form diminutives in -odshi, -osi, -usi, etc. The distinction between animate and inanimate gender is not made in this language family; much less that between the male and the female sex. The possessive pronoun of the third person singular and plural (im-, in-, i-) is prefixed in the same manner to substantives to indicate possession, as it is to verbs to show that an act is performed in the interest or to the detriment of the verbal subject or object. The Cha'hta alone distinguishes between the inclusive and the exclusive pronouns we, our, ours. A dual exists neither in the noun nor in the pronoun, but in most of the intransitive verbs. The numerals are built upon the quinary system, the numeral system most frequent in North America. The verb forms a considerable number of tenses and incorporates the prefixed object-pronoun, the interrogative and the negative particle; it has a form for the passive and one for the reflective voice. By a sort of reduplication a distributive form is produced in the verb, adjective and some numerals, which often has a frequentative and iterative function. The lack of a true relative pronoun and of a true substantive verb is supplied in different ways by the various dialects; the former, for instance, by the frequent use of the verbal in -t. Derivatives are formed by prefixation and suffixation, many of the derivational being identical with inflectional affixes in these dialects.
Although Maskoki speech, taken as a whole, belongs to the agglutinative type of languages, some forms of it, especially the predicative inflection of the verb and the vocalic changes in the radicals, strongly remind us of the inflective languages. Words, phrases and sentences are sometimes composed by syncope, a process which is more characteristic of the agglutinative than of the inflective type, and is by no means confined to the languages of America.
In the following comparative table I have gathered some terms of Maskoki which coincide in two or more of the dialects. The table may be helpful for giving a general idea of the lexical differences existing between the dialects explored: