BOAS] HANDBOOK OF AMERICAN INDIAN LANGUAGES 119 



seems certain that these sounds do have the force mentioned above, 

 it is found, by making comparisons, that they follow certain prefixes. 

 In many cases the nature of the prefix requires the act to be thought 

 of as beginning, ending, or progressing. The sound which is of most 

 frequent occurrence is w. It stands at the beginning of a syllable, 

 usually the one immediately preceding the root. The remainder of 

 this syllable contains the subjective personal elements. Its initiatory 

 force can be seen in the verbs wlnyah come on and ivinxa water lies 

 THERE. This last verb can not be applied to a natural body of water, 

 like the ocean, which has had no beginning. The following prefixes 

 require w in the definite tenses: ya-^ ye-, xa-, sae-, da-, de-d-, du-. 



In a precisely parallel manner, n occurs as the initial of the inflected 

 syllable under circumstances which point to the completion of the act. 

 With winyaL (above) compare ninyal it arrived. Most of the pre- 

 fixes which require n to follow in the definite tenses require the act 

 to be viewed as ending. They are the following: wa-, he-, me-, 

 na- (3), no-, -tee-. 



Without the same exact parallelism of forms which obtains with the 

 two mentioned above, a large number of verbs have s as the charac- 

 teristic of the inflected syllable of the definite tenses. Most of these 

 verbs clearly contain the idea of progression, or are used of acts which 

 require considerable time for their accomplishment. The distributive 

 prefix te- is always followed by s, never by either of the other signs, 

 and some of the prefixes listed above are used with s with a distinc- 

 tion in meaning: for example, 



xawinan he took a stone out of a hole (but xa'isyai he came up a 

 hill)^ 



Excluding all the verbs which require one of these three sounds in 

 the definite tenses, there remain a considerable number which have no 

 definite tenses, and therefore no such sounds characterizing them. 



For the sake of convenience, the Hupa verbs have been divided into 

 conjugations, according as they have one or the other of these sounds 

 in the definite tenses or lack definite tenses entirely. There are, accord- 

 ing to this arrangement, four conjugations: the first characterized by 

 w,' the second, by n; the third, by s,' and the fourth lacking definite 

 tenses. 



iln one of the Eel river dialects the bringing home of a deer is narrated as follows: y'lgingm he 

 started carrying; yitesgln he carried along; ymingm he arrived carrying. Here we have g (corre- 

 sponding to Hupa w) , fi, and n used with the same stem, expressing the exact shades one would expect 

 in Hupa. 



§35 



