454: APPENDIX. 



in the present inquiry, tlie remarks I intend offering on the verb, 

 until I have considered the substantive, and its more important 

 adjuncts. 



Palpable objects, to which the idea of sense strongly attaches, 

 and the actions or condition, which determine the relation of one 

 object to another, are perhaps the first points to demand attention 

 in the invention of languages. And they have certainly imprinted 

 themselves very strongly, with all their materiality, and with all 

 their local, and exclusive, and personal peculiarities upon the 

 Indian. The noun and the verb not only thus constitute the 

 principal elements of speech, as in all languages ; but they con- 

 tinue to perform their first offices, with less direct aid from the 

 auxiliary parts of speech, than would appear to be reconcilable 

 with a clear expression of the circumstances of time and place, 

 number and person, quality and quantity, action and repose, and 

 the other accidents, on which their definite employment depends. 

 Bat to enable the substantives and attributives to perform these 

 complex offices, they are provided with inflections, and undergo 

 changes and modifications, by which words and phrases become 

 very concrete in their meaning, and are lengthened out to appear 

 formidable to the eye. Hence the polysyllabic, and the descrip- 

 tive character of the language, so composite in its aspect and in 

 its forms. 



To utter succinctly, and in as few words as possible, the promi- 

 nent ideas resting upon the mind of the speaker, appear to have 

 been the paramount object with the inventors of the language. 

 Hence, concentration became a leading feature. And the pronoun, 

 the adjective, the adverb, and the preposition, however they may 

 be disjunctively employed in certain cases, are chiefly useful as 

 furnishing materials to the speaker, to be worked up into the com- 

 plicated texture of the verb and the substantive. Nothing, in 

 fact, can be more unlike, than the language, viewed in its original, 

 elementary state — in a vocabulary, for instance, of its primitive 

 words, so far as such a vocabulary can now be formed, and the 

 same language as heard under its oral, amalgamated form. Its 

 transpositions may be likened to a picture, in which the copal, 

 the carmine, and the white lead, are no longer recognized as dis- 

 tinct substances, but each of which has contributed its share to- 

 wards the effect. It is the painter only who possesses the priuci- 



