2i6 VESTIGES OF THE 



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 Crossing the Pacific, we come to the last great family 

 in the lansfuao^es of the aborijjfinal Americans, which have 

 all of them features in common, proving them to con- 

 stitute a group by themselves, without any regard to the 

 very different degrees of civilisation v*'hich these nations 

 had attained at the time of the discovery. Tlie common 

 resemblance is in the grammatical structure as well as in 

 words, and the grammatical structure of this family is 

 of a very peculiar and complicated kind. The general 

 character in this respect has caused the term Poly- 

 synthetic to be applied to the American languages. A 

 long many-syllabled word is used by the rude Algonquins 

 and Delawares to express a whole sentence : for example, 

 a woman of the latter nation, playing with a little dog 

 or cat, would perhaps be heard saying, " hidigatschis" 

 meaning, " give me your pretty little paw ; " the word, 

 on examination, is found to be made up in this manner : 

 k, the second personal pronoun ; uli, part of the word 

 wulet, pretty ; gat, part of the word wichgat, signifying a 

 leg or paw ; schis, conveying the idea of littleness. In the 

 same tongue, a youth is called pilape, a word compounded 

 from the first part of pilsit, innocent, and the latter part 

 of lenape, a man. Thus, it will be observed, a number 

 of parts of words are taken and thrown together, by a 

 process which has been happily termed agglutination, so 

 as to form one word, conveying a complicated idea. 

 There is also an elaborate system of inllection ; in nouns, 

 for instance, there is one kind of inflection to express 

 the presence or absence of vitality, and another to express 

 number. The genius of the language has been described 

 as accumulative : it " tends rather to add syllables or 

 letters, making farther distinctions in objects already 

 before the mind than to introduce new words." '^ Yet it 

 '* Rchoolcruft. 



