THE INDIANS 221 



Whether his enthusiasm is to be fully shared, or whether 

 such a view must be taken as going obviously too far, if 

 only because the language was conceived by savages, may 

 be left for scholars yet to come. 



Superficially, the structure of the language has some 

 resemblances to Latin, mainly in its wonderfully inflected 

 verb. The noun is little inflected, although it has a certain 

 accusative usage. The adjective is put in a verbal form, 

 as wapau, "it is white"; hence wapush, " little- white-one " 

 (rabbit), and wapilao, "white partridge." Adverbs are 

 favoured, and are often placed early in the sentence, as in 

 "Quickly I ran." Pronouns are rather fully inflected. 

 The particles are wanting. Of the verb it may be said 

 that it bears nearly the whole weight of the language. 

 The development of this part of speech is extraordinary. 

 The Dictionary of Father Lemoine gives three hundred and 

 seventy-seven inflections of a single regular verb, and pre- 

 sents no less than fifteen conjugations. The number of 

 inflections in actual use much exceeds this number. 



The resemblance to Latin is quite close in some of these 

 verbal inflections, notably such as the imperfect in -aban 

 as compared with -abat in Latin, and the perfect with the 

 sharp it, as in the Latin amavit. 



The dual form for we exists, as in the primitive Greek 

 and German. A special inflection is observed when the 

 subject of the verb is speaking to a person present. The 

 number of inflections is nearly doubled by the use of sepa- 

 rate forms for animate and inanimate objects, thus: 



I like the dog ni shatshitan atum. 



I like the tent ni shatshiau mitshiuap. 



