[BURWASH] GIFT TO A NATION 5 
were kept at a public school in Lincolnshire for six or seven years, 
ensuring a good training in languages, history, geography and mathema- 
tics. This was followed by an apprenticeship to commercial life, which 
gave a practical turn to his scholastic attainments and made him an 
unusually well furnished teacher. But his great strength lay in his 
natural gifts. He had a rare ear for languages, for their vocal music 
and their phonetic elements, and he had made this a special study. 
His powers of observation were unusually alert and accurate, especially 
in all things human, and he possessed an inventive genius which could 
find some means to overcome every difficulty. 
In the year 1828 he was called, by the Superintendent of Methodist 
Missions to the Indian tribes, to take charge of the Mission School at Rice 
Lake, and he thus entered upon the work of his life. He brought to 
bear upon this work his varied attainments as a scholar, his experience 
as a teacher, but especially his powers of accurate observation and his 
capacity for the study of language. Already translations had been 
made into the Ojibway of portions of Scripture, hymns, and other 
short treatises by Peter Jones, and others, so that his scholars were not 
without books, which they might be taught to read. He soon found that 
the difficulty of accomplishing this lay, not in the capacity of the children, 
but in the imperfection and uncertainty of the orthography which at- 
tempted to write the Ojibway language by means of the Roman alpha- 
bet. In 1831 he was appointed to the Credit, and in 1834 to Sarnia. 
The Indians of these three important reservations all spoke the same 
language, thus enabling him to continue his studies and work of trans- 
lation. It was here that by the year 1836, he finally mastered his 
problem and proposed its solution. He had discovered that the funda- 
mental alphabet elements of the language were few in number and very 
simple in their combinations. Eight consonants and four vowels he 
found sufficient to represent the whole language. In his Speller and 
Interpreter he says, “The author’s object during several years of 
attentive investigation has been to discover first the true position of the 
organs of the various sounds of the Ojibway language; and secondly, 
to select from the Roman characters such letters as in their English 
sound are most analogous to the Ojibway. The consonants used in 
this work are b, d, g, j, m, n, z, 8, each character (except m and n which 
are purely English) representing a compound sound never found in our 
language. The vowels are four in number, viz., a, e, 0, u, each repre- 
senting a short perfect vowel sound. These vowels doubled as aa, ee, 
00, uu, express the long sounds of the same vowels, remaining under this 
prolongation perfect vowels; requiring, however, a stronger emission 
of the breath than the short a, e, 0, u, which has led in some instances 
to their being written with the English h preceding them when in fact 
