1889-90.] THE DiN"^ LANGUAGES. 193 



Some of these personal forms have no equivalents in any language that 

 I know of, and consequently require a word of explanation. Noetsce'as 

 and nitas are distinguished practically by a slight difference of meaning 

 only. Nitas is the regular dual of concomitancy which implies that the 

 locomotion is executed by both of us, while lUBtscB as substitutes to 

 the idea of the first person that of the impersonal : one is walking a deux. 

 NiJiya and nceheya, with their co-relatives of the other tenses, also convey 

 the idea of indefiniteness, but coupled with that of the second and the 

 third person of the plural. For instance, a native orator, while giving 

 orders to a group of fellow countrymen and unwilling to designate any 

 one of them in particular, will say (in the eventual future) : ndJiya'' you 

 shall walk," meaning : one of you shall walk. Again, referring to an 

 undesignated person in a crowd which he is not directly addressing, he 

 might say in an indefinite manner : nceJidya, " they shall walk," that is, 

 some unknown or purposely unnamed person among them shall walk. 



The same remarks apply to the verb scesta and derivatives. Should 

 I say to a group of Indians : tcvftsi, "sit down," all my audience will at 

 once understand me. But if, instead, I were to say : scBhta — the pro- 

 nominal element of which has the // characteristic of the second person 

 plural, though the radical retains its singular form — the natives would 

 immediately understand that I mean only one of tJieni to sit down, and 

 they would be at a loss to know who is to comply with my request. 



Abstracting the many irregularities of the Dene verbs, all their inflec- 

 tions may be reduced to three conjugations, which are characterized by 

 the consonant of the pronominal crement of the second person singular.* 

 n denotes the first, C the second, and / the third. The verbs above con- 

 jugated — with the exception of the last (scssta), which, in common with 

 some irregular verbs, takes for the singular and dual the characteristics 

 of the first, and for the plural that of the second conjugation — all belong 

 to the first. Here is the present of verbs of the second and of the 

 third. 



*Petitot in his Grammaire comparee of the Eastern dialects counts four conjugations, three of 

 which he bases on the pronominal vocalic inflection, the second being in es, the third in as and 

 the fourth in us, while the first he states to consist in the mere juxtaposition of a personal pro- 

 noun to an adjective, a preposition or an adverb. On this side of the Rockies, we have no other 

 equivalents of this uninflected conjugation — if conjugation it can be called — than five or six irre- 

 gular verbs as s-ra-hwolna' (lit. me-on-account-of-difficulty), " I am difficult." I think it prefer- 

 able to treat them as so many unimportant anomalies to making them constitute a separate con- 

 jugation. 



