CHaprTer' IIT

IN THE NORTH
[1890-1900]

T GOES without saying that Father Morice had to

repeat on behalf of his new charge the linguistic

studies through which he had gone for the benefit
of the Chilcotins. The roots and most of the sounds
were indeed the same, but the words often altogether
different; so much so that when he appeared in Stuart
Lake, he could not understand a single word of what
his new flock was telling him. Yet, in the course of
one year or so, he could converse in a way with them,
without, of course, possessing even one-fiftieth of the
language.

When he left, nineteen years later, he passed for
knowing this better than the natives themselves,!
and, despite the millions of words and over half a
hundred varieties of verbs it boasts, the sense and na-
ture of all of which had to be discovered, he has since
compiled a monumental work, grammar and dictionary
at the same time, not the one followed by the other,
which is now being printed in Vienna, Austria.

The author of that wonderful work has often been

1 Which could naturally be said of a theoretical knowledge only,
he writes us, meaning that the Indians realized that he was more familiar
than any of them with its make-up and the reasons of its grammatical or
syntactical peculiarities. As we write this, we happen to have before
us two bits of paper on the question, the one written by one of their own
chiefs and the other by a Mr. Robt. Watson, who had been charged to
enquire of them about a difficult little point which was not quite clear in
his mind. “It is our language, but you know it better than we do,”
expressly says the first (May 2, 1929), ina letter to Father Morice, while
Mr. Watson’s note, pencilled after an interview with the Indians, has it

that ‘‘Louis Billy says Morice knows really better the language than he
does himself.”

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