Siouan and Iroquoian

Abstract

That the of the West were at some time in the past one people with the Iroquois of the East, speaking the same language and having the same culture, has been suspected. Morgan, in his Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family, assumed such a connection the basis of a striking similarity between the systems of relationship terms in Seneca and Dakota. Sapir, in Science, vol. 54, I92I, p. 408, in a tentative scheme of classification of languages north of Mexico, includes Siouan and Iroquoian in the great family which he labels the Hokan-Siouan Group, and which includes: Yuki, Hokan, Coahuiltecan, Keres, Tunica, Siouan-Yuchi-Muskogian, Iroquois-Caddoan. One might add to this tentative group Timucuan, Arawak and Carib, all belonging to the Siouan type, and affording interesting morphological and lexical parallels to Siouan and Iroquoian. This Hokan-Siouan Group, as well as the other families in this scheme of classification, was constituted, we are told, on the basis of both morphological and, in part, lexical evidence. However, to the knowledge of the present writer, no comparative study of Siouan and Iroquoian has as yet been attempted. And it must be admitted that such a comparative study does not look very promising at first glance. The writer's persistence in the attempt was due, perhaps, more than to anything else, to the evident conviction with which a Wyandot Indian assured him that when he went to an Indian school in Indiana, along with boys from several Indian stocks, he felt by far the most at home with the Sioux, as they seemed to be the same sort of people as the Wyandots, and the words of their language seemed much less unfamiliar to him than those of the