b. The Yatassi, Natchitoches, Adaize (or Adaye), Nacogdoches, and Keyes, belong to the Caddo confederacy, but without speaking the Caddo language.
c. The Carancouas, the Attacapas, the Apelusas, the Mayes speak dialects of the same language.
d. The Tunicas speak the same language as the Choctahs.
Concerning the philology of the Washas, the Bedies, the Acossesaws, and the Cances, no statements are made.
It is obvious that the information supplied by the Mithridates is measured by the extent of our knowledge of the four languages to which it refers.
Of these, the Choktah, which Adelung calls the Mobilian, is the only one for which the Mithridates itself supplies, or could supply, specimens; the other three being unrepresented by any sample whatever. Hence, to say that the Tachi was Caddo, that the Yatassi was Adahi, or that the Carancoua was Attacapa, was to give an instance, in the way of explanation, of the obscurum per obscurius. Since the publication of the Mithridates, however, we have got samples of all three—Caddo, Adahi, and Attacapa—so that our standards of comparison are improved. They are to be found in a tabulated form, and in a form convenient for collation and comparison in both of Gallatin's papers. They were all collected before the annexation of Texas, and they appear in the papers just referred to as Louisiana, rather than truly Texian, languages; being common to the two areas.
Of the works and papers written upon Texas since it became a field of observation for English and American, as opposed to French and Spanish observers, the two on which the present writer, when he treated of the subject in his work on the Varieties of Mankind, most especially, and perhaps exclusively relied, were the well-known work of Kennedy on Texas, and a MS. with which he was favoured by Mr. Bollaert, specially limited to the ethnology of the State. Of this MS. a short abstract is to be found in the Report of the British Association for the Advancement of Science for the year 1846, made by Mr. Bollaert himself.
The later the notice of Texas the greater the prominence given to a tribe of which nothing is said in the Mithridates; viz. the Cumanch. As late as 1844 we had nothing beyond the numerals and a most scanty MS. list of words to tell us what the Cumanch language really was. These, however, were sufficient to show that its affinities were of a somewhat remarkable kind, viz. with the Shoshoni, or Snake, tongues of the southern parts of Oregon[45]. In Mr. Bollaert's notice the Cumanches are divided into three sections: (1) the Cumanch or Jetan, (2) the Lemparack, and (3) the Tenuha, and a list of no less than thirty-five other tribes follows this division, some of these being said to be wholly extinct, some partially so; some to be more or less Cumanch, some to be other than Cumanch.
The tendency of the Mithridates is to give prominence to the Caddo, Attacapa, and Adahi tongues, and to incline the investigator, when dealing with the other forms of speech, to ask how far they are connected with one of these three. The tendency of the writers last-named is to give prominence to the Cumanch, and to suggest the question: How far is this (or that) form of speech Cumanch or other than Cumanch?