It is believed that a name should be simply a denotive word, and that no advantage can accrue from a descriptive or connotive title.  It is therefore desirable to have the names as simple as possible, consistent with other and more important considerations.  For this reason it has been found impracticable to recognize as family names designations based on several distinct terms, such as descriptive phrases, and words compounded from two or more geographic names.  Such phrases and compound words have been rejected.

There are many linguistic families in North America, and in a number of them there are many tribes speaking diverse languages.  It is important, therefore, that some form should be given to the family name by which it may be distinguished from the name of a single tribe or language.  In many cases some one language within a stock has been taken as the type and its name given to the entire family; so that the name of a language and that of the stock to which it belongs are identical.  This is inconvenient and leads to confusion.  For such reasons it has been decided to give each family name the termination “an” or “ian.”

Conforming to the principles thus enunciated, the following rules have been formulated: 

  I. The law of priority relating to the nomenclature of the
  systematic philology of the North American tribes shall not extend
  to authors whose works are of date anterior to the year 1836.

  II.  The name originally given by the founder of a linguistic group
  to designate it as a family or stock of languages shall be
  permanently retained to the exclusion of all others.

  III.  No family name shall be recognized if composed of more than one
  word.

  IV.  A family name once established shall not be canceled in any
  subsequent division of the group, but shall be retained in a
  restricted sense for one of its constituent portions.

  V. Family names shall be distinguished as such by the termination
  “an” or “ian.”

  VI.  No name shall be accepted for a linguistic family unless used to
  designate a tribe or group of tribes as a linguistic stock.

  VII.  No family name shall be accepted unless there is given the
  habitat of tribe or tribes to which it is applied.

  VIII.  The original orthography of a name shall be rigidly preserved
  except as provided for in rule III, and unless a typographical error
  is evident.

The terms “family” and “stock” are here applied interchangeably to a group of languages that are supposed to be cognate.