Derivation: From the Cochití term Suinyi, said to mean “the people of the long nails,” referring to the surgeons of Zuñi who always wear some of their nails very long (Cushing).
Turner was able to compare the Zuñi language with the Keran, and his conclusion that they were entirely distinct has been fully substantiated. Turner had vocabularies collected by Lieut. Simpson and by Capt. Eaton, and also one collected by Lieut. Whipple.
The small amount of linguistic material accessible to the earlier writers accounts for the little done in the way of classifying the Pueblo languages. Latham possessed vocabularies of the Moqui, Zuñi, A´coma or Laguna, Jemez, Tesuque, and Taos or Picuri. The affinity of the Tusayan (Moqui) tongue with the Comanche and other Shoshonean languages early attracted attention, and Latham pointed it out with some particularity. With the other Pueblo languages he does little, and attempts no classification into stocks.
[GEOGRAPHIC DISTRIBUTION.]
The Zuñi occupy but a single permanent pueblo, on the Zuñi River, western New Mexico. Recently, however, the summer villages of Tâiakwin, Heshotatsína, and K’iapkwainakwin have been occupied by a few families during the entire year.
[Population.—]The present population is 1,613.
[CONCLUDING REMARKS.]
The task involved in the foregoing classification has been accomplished by intermittent labors extending through more than twenty years of time. Many thousand printed vocabularies, embracing numerous larger lexic and grammatic works, have been studied and compared. In addition to the printed material, a very large body of manuscript matter has been used, which is now in the archives of the Bureau of Ethnology, and which, it is hoped, will ultimately be published. The author does not desire that his work shall be considered final, but rather as initiatory and tentative. The task of studying many hundreds of languages and deriving therefrom ultimate conclusions as contributions to the science of philology is one of great magnitude, and in its accomplishment an army of scholars must be employed. The wealth of this promised harvest appeals strongly to the scholars of America for systematic and patient labor. The languages are many and greatly diverse in their characteristics, in grammatic as well as in lexic elements. The author believes it is safe to affirm that the philosophy of language is some time to be greatly enriched from this source. From the materials which have been and may be gathered in this field the evolution of language can be studied from an early form, wherein words are usually not parts of speech, to a form where the parts of speech are somewhat differentiated; and where the growth of gender, number, and case systems, together with the development of tense and mode systems can be observed. The evolution of mind in the endeavor to express thought, by coining, combining, and contracting words and by organizing logical sentences through the development of parts of speech and their syntactic arrangement, is abundantly illustrated. The languages are very unequally developed in their several parts. Low gender systems appear with high tense systems, highly evolved case systems with slightly developed mode systems; and there is scarcely any one of these languages, so far as they have been studied, which does not exhibit archaic devices in its grammar.
The author has delayed the present publication somewhat, expecting to supplement it with another paper on the characteristics of those languages which have been most fully recorded, but such supplementary paper has already grown too large for this place and is yet unfinished, while the necessity for speedy publication of the present results seems to be imperative. The needs of the Bureau of Ethnology, in directing the work of the linguists employed in it, and especially in securing and organizing the labor of a large body of collaborators throughout the country, call for this publication at the present time.
In arranging the scheme of linguistic families the author has proceeded very conservatively. Again and again languages have been thrown together as constituting one family and afterwards have been separated, while other languages at first deemed unrelated have ultimately been combined in one stock. Notwithstanding all this care, there remain a number of doubtful cases. For example, Buschmann has thrown the Shoshonean and Nahuatlan families into one. Now the Shoshonean languages are those best known to the author, and with some of them he has a tolerable speaking acquaintance. The evidence brought forward by Buschmann and others seems to be doubtful. A part is derived from jargon words, another part from adventitious similarities, while some facts seem to give warrant to the conclusion that they should be considered as one stock, but the author prefers, under the present state of knowledge, to hold them apart and await further evidence, being inclined to the opinion that the peoples speaking these languages have borrowed some part of their vocabularies from one another.