Biblioteca Digital Curt Nimuendaju

Nota de D. Q. Brinton, publicada em Science, vol. XX, n. 499, p. 115:

The Primitive Carib Tongue.

The expedition led by Dr. Karl von den Steinen, which explored the head-waters of the Schingu River in Brazil, made some remarkable discoveries. Tribes were found who had never heard of a white man, and were utterly ignorant of his inventions. They were still wholly in the stone age, uncontaminated—the word is not misapplied — by any breath of civilization. In ethnography, the most interesting find was the identification of the Bacahiris with the Carib stem, and apparently its recognition as perhaps the nearest of any of the Carib tribes to the original stock.

Dr. von den Steinen has just issued his linguistic material obtained from this tribe in a neat octavo of 403 pages, " Die Bakairi-Sprache " (K. F. Koehler, Leipzig, 1892). It contains abundant sources for the study of the group, vocabularies, texts, narratives, grammatical observations, and, what is peculiarly valuable, a close study of the phonetic variations of the various Carib dialects as far as they have been ascertained. He shows that in all the associated idioms the same laws of verbal modification hold good, although each has developed under its own peculiar influences. The thoroughness which marks throughout this excellent study places it in the front rank of contributions to the growing science of American linguistics.