BOAS] HANDBOOK OF AMERICAN INDIAN LANGUAGES 65 



certain state, will hardly occur in primitive speech. Thus the Indian 

 will not speak of goodness as such, although he may very well speak 

 of the goodness of a person. He will not speak of a state of bliss 

 apart from the person who is in such a state. He will not refer to 

 the power of seeing without designating an individual who has such 

 power. Thus it happens that in languages in which the idea of pos- 

 session is expressed by elements subordinated to nouns, all abstract 

 terms appear always with possessive elements. It is, however, per- 

 fectly conceivable that an Indian trained in philosophic thought 

 would proceed to free the underlying nominal forms from the pos- 

 sessive elements, and thus reach abstract forms strictly correspond- 

 ing to the abstract forms of our modern languages. I have made 

 this experiment, for instance, with the Kwakiutl language of Van- 

 couver Island, in which no abstract term ever occurs without its 

 possessive elements. After some discussion, I found it perfectly easy 

 to develop the idea of the abstract term in the mind of the Indian, 

 who will state that the word without a possessive pronoun gives a 

 sense, although it is not used idiomatically. I succeeded, for instance, 

 in this manner, in isolating the terms for love and inty, which ordi- 

 narily occur only in possessive forms, like Ms love for him or my pity 

 for you. That this view is correct may also be observed in languages 

 in which possessive elements appear as independent forms, as, for 

 instance, in the Siouan languages. In these, pure abstract terms 

 are quite common. 



There is also evidence that other specializing elements, which are 

 so characteristic of many Indian languages, may be dispensed with 

 when, for one reason or another, it seems desirable to generalize a 

 term. To use the example of the Kwakiutl language, the idea to 

 he seated is almost always expressed with an inseparable suffix 

 expressing the place in which a person is seated, as seated on the 

 fioor of the house, on the ground, on the heach, on a pile of things, 

 or on a round thing, etc. When, however, for some reason, the 

 dea of the state of sitting is to be emphasized, a form may be 

 used which expresses simply being in a sitting posture. In this 

 case, also, the device for generalized expression is present, but the 

 opportunity for its application arises seldom, or perhaps never. I 

 think what is true in these cases is true of the structure of every sin- 

 gle language. The fact that generalized forms of expression are not 

 44877— BuU. 40, pt 1—10 5 



