he canoes and the canoe manufacture of the North Pacific area have already received a fair amount of attention in ethnographical literature.[1] Many sizes and shapes of craft are in use, most of which have not been described in detail. All North Pacific canoes from Mount St Elias in Alaska to Eel river in northern California are, to quote the Handbook, [2] of a dugout type. The area of Puget sound lies in a general way toward the center of this region, and in this vicinity the largest variety of canoes seems to be in use. Our present purpose is to describe the types of canoes found at the present time on Puget sound proper, and then to outline, so far as is possible on the basis of scanty information, the distribution of these types into other regions.
The specimens on which this discussion is based were collected for the Museum of the American Indian, Heye Foundation, in the immediate vicinity of Seattle. The native terms for the various models and for the parts of the canoes are in the “Duwamish” dialect of Salish. The sounds occurring in this and the other Salish dialects spoken on the upper part of Puget sound are represented in the following tabulation.
| VOWELS | ||||||
| i, | ι | u, | υ | |||
| e, | ε | o, | ↄ | |||
| Δ | ||||||
| α | a | |||||
| i, as in machine ι, as in pin e, as in fête ε, as in met α, as in hat | u, as in rule υ, as in full o, as in note ↄ, as ou in ought a, as in bar |
| Δ, as in but | |
| DIPHTHONGS | |
| ai, as in aisle | oi, as in boil |
| SEMIVOWELS | |
| w, y, substantially as in English | |
| CONSONANTS | ||||||||||||
| Stop | Labialized stop | Continuant | Affricative | Lateral | Affricative lateral | |||||||
| Surd | Sonant | Fortis | Surd | Fortis | Surd | Surd | Fortis | Surd | Sonant | Surd | Fortis | |
| Labial | p | b | p’ | |||||||||
| Dental | t | d | t’ | s | ts | ts’ | L | l | tL | tL’ | ||
| Alveolar | c | tc | tc’ | |||||||||
| Palatal | k | g | g’ | kw | kw’ | |||||||
| Velar | q | γ | q’ | qw | qw’ | |||||||
| Glottal | ’ | h,´ | ||||||||||
Of these sounds the following need, for the casual reader, some explanation. Surd l (written L) is an l produced without the help of the vocal cords. The symbol c has approximately the value of sh in she. The digraph tc is sounded like ch in church. The symbols in those columns which are headed “fortis” represent exploded or cracked consonants, produced with hard pressure of the tongue, followed by an abrupt release. The sound is quite sharp, markedly different from anything in English. The “velar” sounds likewise seem quite strange to English-speaking people; they are produced by making contact between the tongue and the back part of the palate (the velum). The glottal stop (’) represents a catch which checks the breath in the throat (larynx). Two sounds resembling English h seem to exist, one of them very weak, represented here by c. Superior letters represent whispered or weakly articulated sounds.