THE DEVELOPMENT OF LANGUAGE. 115 



missionaiy, the Rev. Dv. Whitman, — whose deplorable fate, which 

 befell him, with his family, a few years after I met them, (their 

 massacre by anothei' Indian tribe) forms one of the saddest tragedies 

 in the history of modern missions. 



The Sahaptin is throughout an inflected language. Its nouns have 

 eight cases — nominative, genitive, accusative, two datives and three 

 ablatives. They have two numbers, the plural being formed from 

 the singular, for the most part, by a syllabic reduplication, similar to 

 that which forms the perfect tense in the Sanscrit, the Greek and the 

 Mseso-Gothic. Thus pitin, girl, makes in the plural pipitin ; atwai 

 old woman, aatioai ; tahs, good, titahs. To this rule there is an 

 exception in the case of words expressing the various family relations, 

 where the plural is formed by adding ma to the singular, as pika 

 mother, pi. pikama. The adjectives are varied like the substantives 

 and agree with them in case and in number. The following are the 

 case variations : 



Nom. mit, house .... tahs, good 



Gen. ininm, of a house . . . tahsnim 



Ace. inina, house . . . tahsna 



1st Dat. iiiitph, to or for a house . . tahspli 



2nd Dat. initpa, in or on a house . tahspa 



1st Abl. initki, with a house (instrument) tahski 



2nd Abl. initpkinih, from a house . tahspkinih. 



3rd Abl. initain, for the purpose of a house, tahsain. 



It will be seen at once, in the dative and ablative cases, how much 

 more " profoundly reasoned and accurately classified" (to use an ex- 

 pression which I shall have occasion to quote from Professor Max 



Miiller) are the Sahaptin case-distinctions than the Aryan. 



It is possible, and indeed probable, that both in the Sahaptin and 

 in the Aiyan languages the case terminations, or many of them, are 

 relics of primitive prepositions ; but if so, all traces of such 

 jireiDOsitions seem to have vanished, at least from the Sahaptin. 

 If they once existed, it was, I believe, in the primitive household in 

 which the language was first formed and brought to its fullest matur- 

 ity, while all the members were still united. 



There is, however, fair reason for questioning whether the case 

 terminations may not, in some instances, have been, from the first. 



