Some characteristics of the language, such as the absence of labials, constitute not only a distinctive difference from the old Huron speech, but afford proof of the latter being the older form. “It is a fact,” says Professor Max Müller, in referring to his intercourse with an intelligent native Mohawk, then a student at Oxford, “that the Mohawks never, either as infants or as grown-up people, articulate with their lips. They have no _p_, _b_, _m_, _f_, _v_, _w_—no labials of any kind.”[145] The statement, so far as the Mohawk infants are concerned, is open to further inquiry; but Dr. Oronhyatekha, the Mohawk referred to, who pursued his studies for a time in the University of Toronto, and to whom I have been largely indebted in this and other researches in Indian philology, not only rejects the six letters already named, but also _c_, _g_, _l_, _z_. The alphabet is thus reduced to seventeen letters. Professor Max Müller notes in passing, that the name “Mohawk” would seem to prove the use of the labial. But it is of foreign origin, though possibly derived from their own term: _oegwehokough_, “people.” The name employed by themselves is “Canienga.” The practice of speaking without ever closing the lips is an acquired habit of later origin than the forms of the parent tongue. A comparison of any of the Iroquois dialects with the Huron as still spoken by the Wyandots of Ontario, shows the _m_ in use by the latter in what is no doubt a surviving example of the oldest form of the Huron-Iroquois language. This Huron _m_ frequently becomes _w_ in the Iroquois dialects, _e.g._ _skatamendjaweh_, “one hundred,” becomes in Mohawk _unskadewennyaweh_; _rume_, “man,” Mohawk, _ronkwe_, etc. These and other examples of this interchangeable characteristic of Indian phonology, and the process of substitution in the absence of labials, are illustrated in the table of Huron-Iroquois numerals on the following page. The habit of invariably speaking with the lips open is the source of very curious modifications in the Iroquois vocabularies when compared with that of the Wyandots. The _m_ gives place to _w_, _nw_, _nh_, or _nhu_; also to _ku_ and _nkw_, and so frequently changes the whole character of the word by the modifications it gives rise to.