116 PROCEEDINGS OF THE CANADIAN INSTITUTl::. 



pure inflections, or phonetic changes, suggested by the language'- 

 forming faculty, to express distinctions of meaning. As Professoi- 

 Sayce has well suggested in his " Princi]jles of Comparative Phil- 

 ology," the original Arabic case-endings, which are the three primaxy 

 vowels, a, i and o, either pure or nasalized — and which, as Oriental- 

 ists suppose, formerly prevailed thi'oughout the Semitic languages — 

 could hardly have originated in any other way. And certainly the 

 variations by internal vocalic changes, so characteristic of the Semitic 

 lano-uages, and so common in the Aryan tongues, could not have 

 sprung from any agglutinations. 



These internal variations are frequent in the Sahaptin, and are 

 particularly notable in the conjugation of the verb. The Sahaptin 

 verb far surpasses both the Aryan and the Semitic in the variety of 

 its forms and the precision and nicety of its distinctions. It has six 

 moods — indicative, usitative, suppositive, subjunctive, imperative, and 

 infinitive. There are nine tenses — present, perfect, recent past, 

 remote juist, aorist or past indefinite, present future, indefinite 

 future, recent past future, remote past future. Each ^^erb has two 

 verbal adjectives or participles, three verbal nouns, and an adverbial 

 derivative. Further, each verb has many forms, analogous to the 

 Hebrew conjugations. Thus hakisa, to see, has a reciprocal form, 

 2H7i«^■^s«, to see each ' other ; a reflective form, inaksa, I see myself ;, 

 a causative form, shapaksa, to cause to see, to show ; a successive 

 form, wiaksa, to see one thing after another ; and a transitory form, 

 takaksa, to see suddenly, or for a short time. But it is impossible, 

 in such a mere outline, to give anything like an adequate idea of the- 

 richness of the \-erb in this remarkable speech. The point, however, 

 to which attention is particularly to be directed, is that the variations- 

 are evidently inflections, pure and simple. This is shown by the fact 

 that many of them are produced by changes in the primary elements,, 

 both vowels and consonants : thus from hakisa, I see, we hwe (among 

 a vast variety of similar changes) aksaka, (recent past) I have just 

 seen h\m\aksana, (remote past) I did see him, ahahna, (aorist) I saw 

 him, aktatasha^ (present future) I am about to see him, ahnu, (future) 

 I shall see him, ahnah, (usitative) I am wont to see him, akinah, (sup- 

 positive) if I see him, ahnim, (imperative) see him ! hahnaah, (infini- 

 tive) to see. 



