572 Mr. Pickering on Rasle’s Dictionary of 
Rasles. Again; in Abnaki, the word nsrighi, —in which the letter n is the first 
personal pronoun, — signifies J am beautiful, fine, good, &c.; and, if according to 
the general rule, we substitute 7 for r, and & for gh, (at the same time dropping the 
pronoun) we have the Delaware radical wulik, of the same form and import with 
the Abnaki word. In the same manner, we have the abstract term beauty, good- 
ness, &&c. in Abnaki, srighisaigan ; and in Delaware, with the dialectical differ- 
ences, wulissowagan. The numeral five, which in Abnaki is barenesks, in the 
Delaware is palenach; between which two words we may trace an affinity in the 
same manner, though at first view their resemblance is not obvious. So the nume- 
ral ¢en, in Abnaki is métadra, and in Delaware, with the J, becomes ¢ed/len. This 
interchange of 7 and r, it may be added, is also common in various languages of 
Europe ; of which the Spanish and Portuguese languages afford numerous exam- 
ples. The Spanish words obligado, flaco, etc., in Portuguese become obrigado, 
Sraco, etc. 
The advantageous use of the present Dictionary and other philological materials 
of the kind, will demand the more labor and attention, in consequence of their 
having been collected by individuals of different nations, — principally German, 
French, and American writers; each of whom naturally adopted his own alphabet 
as far as it could be used. Without a constant attention to these national differ- 
ences of orthography, many words, which are in fact the same in different dialects 
of the same family, will appear so totally unlike, that they may be taken to belong 
to languages wholly different from each other. No general reader, for instance, 
would take the Massachusetts Indian word for meat or flesh, which is weyaus, as 
Eliot writes it, to be the same with the Abnaki word ouios; yet they are intended 
to represent the same Indian word. 
To those persons, who have not given particular attention to the structure and 
peculiarities of the American Languages, it may not be unacceptable to be in- 
formed of some of the results obtained from the investigations already made, and to 
see how far those results are confirmed by means of the present Dictionary. The 
remarks on this subject will be very brief. 
1. The Animate and Inanimate Forms of Nouns and Verbs. Itis now familiar 
to every philologist, that in the North American languages nouns are not classed 
according to genders, or sexes, but under the two generic divisions of animate and 
inanimate objects; and their plurals are formed according to that classification. 
In the ancient Massachusetts language, for example, the plural of the animate 
