[1263/ say it,” the ‘they’ being the Micniacs living in the central portion of ﬁlegtzmagee, in the neighborhood of Shubenacadie (segu- bmz-dkade) and Stewiake (siktdwéak), Nova Scotia. Continual travel, and frequent councils of the whole tribe, which involved long visits at headquarters, kept the language from branching off into separate dialects, though the ﬁve local variations were quite marked. In the south at Yarmouth the ‘ a ’ was ﬂatted in many words and often when occurring as initial to a word was preceded by a submerged 'y‘ sound, more accurately represented by the Spanish ‘j’ than the Greek aspirate. Take the word alasooa’umm' ‘as they say it,’ which was sounded almost Ya‘lasoodumi at Yarmouth and ﬁlasooa’umai at Restigouche in the north, while in Cape Breton it received its briefer alasoadmai, and in Prince Edward Island, conformed to the standard.

Except for the explosive ‘ikw’ or aspirated ‘k’ there are no sounds which are not familiar to English and French students, and a number of our elementary sounds were never heard in original Micmac: these missing consonants were ‘f,’ ‘v,’ ‘z,’ ‘th,’ ‘sh,’ and ‘ng.’ Some of these have since been adopted into the language, but it is unfair to consider them Micmac, even in words borrowed long ago from the French. In most of the borrowed words euphonic changes were made which completely obscure the original, except to those familiar with the laws of language.

The guttural ‘g’ is always hard, and often displaced by ‘k;’ there are those who maintain that one letter represents accurately both sounds, but the sharper ‘k’ is often found in simple nouns and adjectives, while the ﬂatter ‘g‘ is heard distinctly in related verbs and compound-nouns; it as given in Powell’s alphabet, and adopted by the Smithsonian Institution represents the sound 1612 found in the Eug- lish words ‘church’ and ‘much;’ and as there is no ‘c’ in this Diction- ary the use of it cannot be misinterpreted. Dr. Rand used three characters at different times in his life to represent the sound, some- times introducing an apostrophe to mark the contraction from uklc, ‘ (great). Rev. F. Paciﬁque represents the sound by tj, giving the French sound to j, and for the contraction writes gtj without an apos- trophe. In the face of considerable urging to the contrary, it has been thought best to keep to the [c as used by the Smithsonian Institution.