NAME OF THE DENES AND THEIR HABITAT IN THE NORTH. 3

the Chippewayans are far from being the southernmost of the Déné tribes.
The parent tree has sent out vigorous offshoots far into the American Union and
even old Mexico. That which is the farthest south, the Apache}, calls itself
Nde, instead of Déné. Petitot’s compound name, for which may be claimed
the advantage of genuine Déné phonetics, has never been adopted outside of
its originator’s writings?.

* The Lipans, who went farthest south, were nothing else than an outlying band of Apaches.

* The above, and much of what follows, had been written for some time when, through
the courtesy of Prof. W. H. Holmes, I was put in possession of W. H. Dall’s “Tribes of the
Extreme Northwest”, on which American ethnologists have long relied for their classifications
of the Alaskan Déné tribes. I am sorry to say that, in his treatment of the Dénés, he betrays
an ignorance of their language and phonetics which is decidedly painful to behold in a man
who commences the enumeration of their northwestern tribes by lecturing Father Petitot on
his linguistic shortcomings. It seems that a person who, though he may be an authority
as a naturalist, could not speak out properly a single sentence in any of the many Déné
dialects, should not have presumed to take to task such a Déné scholar as Fr. Petitot, who
has published valuable grammars and dictionaries of three Déné dialects, and is widely known
as the great and only authority on the very idiom of those Indians whose tribes Dall enumerates.
I hold no brief to defend, at this late hour, the learned ethnographer against the ignorant
remarks of his critic; indeed, I have myself on several occasions — notably in the second
volume of the Année Linguistique — affirmed my right to differ from the views of the
reverend gentleman, who was not a little handicapped by the little familiarity he enjoyed
with the works of the American ethnologists, and I shall freely do so whenever occasion
presents itself in the course of this work. But his failings are less linguistic than ethnographic,
and in the case of Dall versus Petitot, I do not hesitate to declare that scarcely an atom of
right can be found on the side of the former. Dall assures us that Fr. Petitot “is in special,
error in regard to the term ‘tinneh’. This he erroneously derives from a verb, ‘osttis, je fais’
and writes otinne’. He then adds: “It is indeed strange that he should not have recognized
in tinneh a direct derivation, or more properly, a correct orthography (for the western tribes,
at least) of the word he does adopt, namely Déné, meaning ‘landsmen’, as the Germans would
say, the o being merely an inserted euphonic”’ (p. 24, footnote). He then appeals to a few
English-speaking fur-traders as to the “true meaning of the word” against the statement of
a philologist who spoke several Déné dialects nearly as well as his native French! I must
charitably presume that, when he so wrote, Dall was not aware of the extraordinary competency
of the man he attacked. “There can be no manner of doubt”, he further adds, ‘as to the
word ‘tinne’ and its representative word ‘Kutchin’ meaning ‘people native to the region’
respectively indicated by its various prefixes”. To which I beg to answer that Dall’s diagnosis
of the whole case is made up almost entirely of illusions and linguistic misconceptions, as
any one familiar with simply the rudiments of the Déné languages could see at a glance.

In the first place, he evinces a deplorable ignorance of the Déné phonetics when he
flaunts his finjee against Petitot’s dindjié, since the Déné ear knows absolutely no difference
between d and ¢# The two readings are identical as to results, save for a delicate vocalic
shade in the last syllable, which Dall could not be expected to notice, who never as much
as perceived the much more emphatic “clicks” in the tribal names he records. I leave it to
up-to-date philologists to appreciate the appositeness of his English ee. Then one can hardly
keep serious in the face of the American writer’s contention that tinneh (lege ‘tinné) and
déné are the same. Such as have some knowledge of the Eskimo terminology will understand
the difference between the two when I state that while Déné (or Téné) is the exact equivalent

of /nnuit, men, homines, -’tinné is the Eskimo tribal desinence -myut, which means people
1*