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1898-99. | LANGUAGE AND RELIGION. 283 
these changes in structure are found in gender, plural, declensions, moods, 
and tenses of the verb and syntax. There does not exist a tribe without 
some kind of grammar, laws of structure, sometimes crude, yet sufficient 
to reveal regularity, beauty and strength. The most savage tribes with- 
‘out any literature possess languages of consistent grammatical structure 
sufficient for all the uses of effective native oratory. No matter how 
low insthe scale of humanity a tribe has been found, it still possesses a 
complete and thoroughly organized language. Languages are not the 
result of mere chance, but are regulated by laws. Some of our native 
Canadian tribes possess in their dialects vehicles for thought more 
expressive and richer than some of the tongues of civilized peoples. 
The Déné language has no single term for “to be broken,” but in lieu 
of the single Aryan term, this American tongue has no less than 
one hundred particularising substitutes, not one of which could be 
indifferently used for the other. These are expressive of the object 
employed to operate the breakage, the manner in which the object was 
affected, and the form of the object. These more than one hundred dis- 
tinct verbs can be multiplied four or five times, according as the iter- 
ative, imitative, terminative, and other forms are used, whereby the 
signification is changed. The Sahaptin language spoken by the Nez 
Perce Indians, according to Hale, surpasses the Aryan and Semitic 
tongues in some of its forms. Its case-distinctions are much more pro- 
foundly reasoned and accurately classified than the Aryan, the verb 
surpasses both the Aryan and Semitic in the variety of its forms, and 
the precision and nicety of its distinctions, its tenses are as completely 
inflectional as Sanskrit, Greek, or German, and it possesses great power 
of agglutination. The Cree language is a beautiful and symmetrical 
tongue, possessing many forms of expression not found in those spoken 
by civilized nations. The paradigms of the verb cover more than two 
hundred and forty closely printed folio pages. The Blackfoot tongue 
is a guttural form of speech, symmetrical and euphonious, very expres- 
sive and abundant in grammatical forms. What has been said concern- 
ing these languages can be repeated for almost any dialect spoken by 
an American Indian tribe. Of the Mohawk tongue Max Miiller says: 
“To my mind, the structure of such a language as the Mohawk is quite 
sufficient evidence that those who worked out such a work of art were 
powerful reasoners and accurate classifiers,’ and of the Algonkin speech, 
Professor Whitney remarks: “There are infinite possibilities and 
expressiveness in such a structure ; and it would only need that some 
native American Greek race should arise to fill it full of thought and 
fancy, and to put it to the uses of a noble literature, and it would be 
rightly admired as rich and flexible, perhaps beyond anything else that 
