A summary classification of the North American systems thus leads to the following tentative scheme : Spier, The Distribution of Kinship Systems in North America, Univ. of Washington Pub. in Anthropology, Seattle, 1925, vol. I, 69-88. op. cit., p. 277.
(a) Iroquois; Dakota; Ojibwa I. Bifurcate Merging (b) Oaaha;1\lnominiSuk Aiwok, intun S. Pomo; Tlingit 2. Bifurcate Collateral Eskimo, Monc 3. Lineal Salish; Nootka, Kwakiutl The Generation system is lacking. Faintly adumbrated, it ap pears in Spier's Mackenzie Basin type, but the generation princi ple is restricted in application, so that there is no approach to the Hawaiian scheme. Various Californian and Basin tribes classed by Spier as of the Mackenzie pattern appropriately fall under the bifurcate collateral group, deviating from the norm only in the grouping of cousins. Such tribes as the Northwestern Maidu be long to the same category and show how this may approach the merging type : parallel cousins here coincide with siblings, while cross-cousins are separated by a special term.' The gap between. this Maidu and the Iroquois system is thus reduced to the distinc tion the former maintains between the father and his brother, the mother and her sister.
Sporadically, instances occur in otherwise bifurcate merging systems of a partial failure to bifurcate. Thus, the Crow, though only in direct address, use one term for the mother and either kind of aunt.
Personal names are generally eschewed in address.
Central American systems are known mainly through such sources as Gilberti's Diccionario de la lengua Tarasca (1559), Molina's V ocabulario de la lengua Mexicana (1571), and Bel tran's Arte del idioma Maya The distinction of elder and younger sibling is general, and so is the use of reciprocal terms between different generations. Thus, Maya mom is applied to the maternal grandfather and the daughter's son. The princi ple of reciprocity occurs among the Miskito of Nicaragua, dapna designating father-in-law and son-in-law, as well as mother-in-law and daughter-in-law in female speech. The former classification is shared by the Chibcha of Colombia. In the Ucayali region, the
Sipibo apply the word rayos to parent-in-law and son-in-law, while the words for maternal uncle and sister's son—cuca and cucu sug gest a common stem.' In America there is thus a fairly continu ous distribution of the reciprocity principle extending from Brit ish Columbia through the Pacific and Basin States into Mexico and northern South America.
Several tribes in Latin America recognize to an unusual extent Kroeber's`category of the speaker's sex. While a Cakchiquel man calls his son cahol and his daughter mial, a woman uses val and vixocal.
From the scanty material accessible it is not clear how com monly bifurcate merging systems occur south of the Rio Grande. Molina's Nahuatl nomenclature is Hawaiian in grouping all uncles with the father, tlatli; but it is lineal in segregating aunts, auitl from the mother, nantli, and all nepotic kin as machtli from the son tepiazin and daughter, teichpuch. The Cakchiquel use of tate for father and paternal uncle is true to the bifurcate merging type, but the reported classification of the paternal aunt with the mother, te, while both maternal aunt and uncle are called vicar is so anomalous as to call for corroboratory Lineal uncle and aunt terms are reported for the Pomeroon Arawak. On the whole, the frequency of lineal and bifurcate collateral features arrests our attention. Thus, the Miskito, while using for the maternal aunt a word from the stem for mother (yapti; mother's sister : yaptislip), call the father aisa, the paternal uncle urappia, the mother's brother tarti. A glossary of Arawakan languages shows no discrimination between paternal and maternal uncles except in Siusi ; there the bifurcate collateral rather than the bifurcate merging principle obtains since the father's brother is not identified with the father. A single term for aunt (distinct 'E. W. Gifford, Californian Kinship Terminologies, Univ. of Cal. Pub., 1922, 18:43.
C. Breton, "Relationships in Central America," in Man, Dec. 1919, 186-192. R. H. Lowrie, Culture and Ethnology, 1917, 125f. von den Steinen, Diccionario Sipibo, Berlin, /.c.