442 BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY [boll. 40 



we have lafnaxwa he goes sometimes and x-iyd'snaxwa place where 

 SOMETHING DISAPPEARS FROM TIME TO TIME (from x'ls- to disap- 

 pear, -as place of). For these reasons a strict classification into 

 nominal and verbal suffixes does not seem admissible. 



§ 10. Nominal Suflfixes 



Nevertheless many suffixes have assumed distinctly the function 

 of giving to a stem a nominal or a verbal character. We find, for 

 instance, many nouns ending in -a and -e^, others ending in -Em, 

 animate beings ending in -dnsjn, and terms of relationship ending in 

 -mp. Besides these, there are a great many which express place 

 and time of an action or process, various forms of the nomen actoris, 

 the results and causes of actions and processes, possession, instru- 

 mentality, material, etc.; in short, a wide range of verbal nouns. 

 They retain, however, their neutral value. This is best expressed by 

 the fact that most of these verbal nouns retain their syntactic rela- 

 tion to the direct and indirect object. The Kwakiutl does not say 

 "the seeing-place of the canoe," but "the place-of-seeing the canoe." 



Among purely verbal suffixes, there are a number which express 

 actions affecting nouns, which for this reason are always (or at least 

 generally) suffixed to nouns, as, "to make," "to take care of," "to 

 sound;" verbs expressing sense impressions, as "to smell of," "to 

 taste like;" and words like "to die of." With these groups maybe 

 classed a number of suffixes which change the subject of the sentence, 

 like the passives and causatives. 



§ 11. Local and Modal Suffixes 



Most important among the suffixes which are both verbal and 

 nominal is the extensive group of local terms. These embrace a great 

 variety of ideas expressed by our prepositions and by many local 

 adverbs, and contain also a long series of more special local ideas 

 (like "in the house," "into the house," "on the ground," "on the 

 beach," "on rocks," "in the fire," "in water") and an exhaustive 

 series of terms designating locally parts of the body (for instance, "on 

 the hand," "on the chest," "on the thigh," "in the body"). A 

 second group classify nouns according to form, and set off human 

 beings as a distinct category. A third class pf suffixes indicate 

 time-relations, such as past, present, and future. With these may be 

 classed the suffixes which indicate the modality of a process as 



§§ 10, 11 



