1885. o4:0 [Brinton. 



means of the particles or the affixes formed from them. This type, 

 taken alone, usually forms the present ; but, accurately speaking, this 

 name cannot be assigned it ; because the signs of the other tenses are 

 also dropped when this can be done without obscurity. Ya-chaguani- 

 me-yaladi. Here the first word is in the indefinite form, though it is not 

 the present but the perfect. The me is really the preposition " in ;" 

 but usage has adopted it for the subjunctive sign, and so the Spanish 

 grammarians call it ; or rather, the verb is considered to be introduced 

 by a conjunction, "if," "as," so that it is usually not in the present 

 but a past tense. If this is the case with the last verb, the first one 

 must have the same tense, and so the whole phrase, without any tense 

 sign, means, " I had helped him when I said it." 



One would scarcely expect to find anything like this in cultivated 

 languages. Yet it does occur in both Sanscrit and Greek. The now 

 meaningless particle sma in Sanscrit when it follows the present 

 changes it into a past, and in Greek w alters the indicative into a sub- 

 junctive. 



To form this general type, the Maipure makes use of the unchanged 

 possessive pronoun, and treats nouns and verbs in the same manner. 

 The noun must always be united to a possessive pronoun, a trait com- 

 mon to all the Orinoco tongues and many other American languages. 

 In the 3d person sing., however, neither the verb nor the noun has such 

 a pronoun, but it is to be understood; nuani, my son; ani, alone, not 

 son, but "his son." The 3d pers. sing, of the verb is of ten the mere 

 stem, without a personal sign, but that this peculiarity should also ex- 

 tend to the noun I have met only in this tongue. It is evident that a 

 pronoun is considered as essential to a noun as to a verb, and although 

 a similar usage is found in many tongues, yet it appears in none so 

 binding. There are, indeed, some nouns which are free from the 

 necessity of thinking them in connection with a person, but these have 

 the suffix ii, which is dropped when the possessive pronoun is added ; 

 Java ti, a hatchet, nu java^ my hatchet. From this it is evident that ti 

 does not belong to the stem, and is incompatible with the use of a pos- 

 sessive, hence it is the sign of the substantive, in its independent con- 

 dition. The same occurs in Mexican, and the chief termination of sub- 

 stantives, tli, is almost identical in sound with that in the Maipure. 



In this respect the verbal, conjugated with the personal signs, differs 

 nothing from the noun united to its possessive pronouns. Grammati- 

 cally, the form first becomes a verbal one by the added particles of 

 tense and mode. The signification of these can generally be clearly 

 ascertained, and thus are united closely to the stem. 



The particles which the language of the Abipones uses to form the 

 general verbal type are quite different from the possessives. The 

 tense and mode particles have elsewhere in the tongue independent 

 meanings. Thus kan, the sign of the perfect, means a thing which 

 has been, time that has past. 



PROG. AMBR. PHILOS. 800. XXII. 120. 2r. PRINTED MAT 29, 1885. 



