446 BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY [bull. 40 



partly by the use of local suffixes which define the exact place where 

 an action is performed, without regard to the speaker; partly by the 

 expression of location in relation to the speaker. Thus the sentence 

 ''My friend is sick" would require in Kwakiutl local definition, such 

 as "My visible friend near me is sick in the house here." Further- 

 more, the psychological relation of the sentence to the state of mind 

 of the speaker — or to the contents of preceding sentences — is expressed 

 with great care. The chief formal characterization of the sentence 

 is the close connection of its parts, which is due to the fewness of 

 syntactic forms by means of which all possible relations are expressed, 

 and to the subordination of the noun under the verb by means of 

 particles which coalesce phonetically with the preceding word, while 

 they determine the function of the following word. 



DESCRIPTION OF GRAMMAR (§§ 18-69) 



Formation of Words (§§ 18-46) 



Com2)ositiou (§§ 18-39) 



§ 18. SUFFIXES 



Compounds are formed by the use of suffixes. There is no proof 

 that the numerous suffixes were originally independent words. I 

 have found only one case in which an independent word appears also 

 as a suffix. This is -(['.es to eat (p. 501), which occurs independ- 

 ently as qlEsa' to eat meat 21.9. We may also suspect that the 

 suffix -2)!a TO taste, and the stem p!aq- to taste, are related. It 

 seems hardly justifiable to infer from these two cases that all suffixes 

 must have originated from independent words; since the inde- 

 pendence of these two stems may be a recent one, or their subordi- 

 nation may have been made according to analogous forms. It is 

 perhaps also not fortuitous that the suffix forms for the idea "to eat" 

 are exceedingly irregular. 



The Kwakiutl language has very few particles, or words unable to 

 be modified by composition with other elements. The suffixed 

 elements coalesce quite firmly with the theme to which they are 

 attached. Pronominal and syntactic suffixes must be distinguished 

 from those forming denominating and predicating ideas, that, by 

 themselves, are not sentences. Among the latter class we find a 

 considerable number that may be designated as terminal or com- 

 pletive, in so far as they round off the theme into a complete word 



§18 



