¹ Most of the field work on the Muskogee language was made possible through two grants (in 1936 and 1937) from the Department of Anthropology, Yale University. The collection of additional materials on Muskogee, particularly historical and ethnological texts, comprised a part of the work done on the history of the Creek Confederacy under a grant from the Penrose Fund of the American Philosophical Society in 1938-39.

² Edward Sapir, Language, an Introduction to the Study of Speech (New York 1921), 63-4.

³ The Muskogee grammatical processes are listed in a slightly different order from that used in Sapir's general list. This is done in order to bring together the two types of ablaut characteristic of Muskogee.

⁴ See my paper, Geminate Consonant Clusters in Muskogee, Lang. 14.61-5.

⁵ In Muskogee infixation configurates as a type of internal modification. In its application it is therefore more closely related to the two types of ablaut than it is to the processes of prefixation and suffixation.

⁶ A summary of Muskogee phonemes is presented in the concluding paragraphs of this paper.

⁷ Specifically, ‘he bought it (about a year or so ago).’ There are four past tenses in Muskogee, viz., (1) today or last night, (2) from yesterday back to several days or weeks ago, (3) several weeks ago back to a year or so ago, and (4) a long time ago, at least several years ago. The example quoted here belongs to the third past tense; the same is true of the next seven examples.

⁸ Note the absence of vowel-lengthening in this example.

⁹ In the case of a root or theme having a long vowel in its final syllable no distinction can be made between Stem I and Stem IV.

¹⁰ Likewise in the case of a root or theme having a short vowel followed by a sonorant in the same syllable, no distinction can be made between Stem I and Stem IV. The next example also illustrates this phenomenon.

¹¹ The triple n in this example is correct. Roots and themes ending in a geminated n insert the infix -n- in forming Stem V just as all other roots and themes do.

¹² This example illustrates the first past tense; the same is true of the following fourteen examples.

¹³ This example illustrates the second past tense. The immediately following example is in the third past tense, the example following it in the fourth past tense.

¹⁴ The Choctaw examples are quoted from Cyrus Byington, A Dictionary of the Choctaw Language (Bulletin, Bureau of American Ethnology, 46; Washington 1915). Certain transliterations have been introduced in order that the orthographical system used in Choctaw might be consistent with that used in the other Muskogean languages.

The Koasati and Muskogee words are taken from my own field notes on these languages.

¹⁵ This phoneme is not listed in my paper cited in note 4. At that time it was erroneously believed to be a variant of n. Since -ŋ- occurs only before k, it cannot be geminated.

¹⁶ Note that the tonal accents may occur on initial, medial, or final syllables and also on consecutive syllables. These phenomena arise from the fact that a number of Muskogee suffixes have an inherent tonal accent which must be preserved no matter how many other accented syllables may occur in the same word.

¹⁷ This discussion of Muskogee ‘tonemes’ supersedes the brief remarks made in my previous paper (Lang. 14.63) pertaining to the same subject.

To present all of the complexities involved in the Muskogee tonemic system would require us to go into considerably more detail than space permits in this discussion. It is hoped that a special paper on Muskogee tonemics may be presented in the near future.