436 ETHNOLOGY. 



tliiuk. Thus, more or less, the people wbo speak those languages 

 would hcgiu seuteuces or periods where we end ours, so that our thoughts 

 would really appear iu their iniud as inverted. 



Those Asiatic languages have, moreover, uo jj^repositious, but ouly 

 ;ws<positions. So likewise has the DaivOTA tongue. 



ThQ pohjsynilietic arrangement which prevails throughout the majority 

 of the American Indian languages is less prominent, and decidedly less 

 intricate in the Dakota tongue than in those of the other tribes of this 

 continent. But it may be safely asserted that the above-mentioned lan- 

 guages of Asia also contain at least a similar polysynthetic tendency^ 

 though merely in an incipient state, a rudimental or partially devel- 

 oped form. Thus, for instance, all the various modifications which the 

 fundamental meaning of a verb has to undergo, such as passive condi- 

 tion, causation, reflexive action, mutuality, and the like, are embodied 

 in the verb itself by means of interposition, or a sort of intercalation of 

 certain characteristic syllables between the root and the grammatical 

 endings of such verb, whereby a long-continued and united series, or 

 catenation, is often obtained, forming apparently one huge word. How- 

 ever, to elucidate this any further here would evidently lead us too far 

 away from our present subject and purpose. We only add that post- 

 positions, pronouns, as well as the interrogative particle, &c., are also 

 commonly blended into one with the nouns, by being inserted one after 

 the other, where several such expressions occur, in the manner al- 

 luded to, the whole being closed by the grammatical terminations, so 

 as often to form words of considerable length.^ May we not feel au- 

 thorized to infer from this some sort of approa(;h, in however feeble a 

 degree, of those Asiatic languages — through this principle of catena- 

 tion — to the general polysynthetic system of the American tongues I 



We now proceed to a singular phenomenon, which we should like to 

 describe technically as a sort of " redupUcatio intcnsitiva.''^ It exists iu 

 the Mongolian and Turco-Tartar branches of the Ural- Altaic group, and 

 some vestiges of it we found, to our great surprise, also in the language 

 of our Sioux Indians. 



This reduplication is iu the above-mentioned Asiatic languages 

 applied particularly to adjectives denoting color and external qualities, 

 and it is just the same iu the Dakota language. It consists in prefix- 

 ing to any given word its first syllable in the shape of a reduplication, 

 this syllable thus occurring twice — often adding to it (as the case may 

 be) a "i>," &G. 



The object — at least in the Asiatic languages alluded to— is to express 

 thereby, in many cases, a higher degree or increase of the quality. An 

 example or two will make it clear. Thus we have, for instance, iu Mon- 

 golian, Mara, which means hlael; and KHAp-/Jmm with the meaning of 

 very black, entirely black; tsayan, ichite, Tii\i)-tsayan, entirely ichite, &(:., 

 and iu the Turkish and the so-called Tartar (Tatar) dialects of Asiatic 



