HINTS AND EXPLANATIONS. Gl 
“wind,” “snow,” or “to drive.”* This synthesis which precedes grammar and concen- 
trates complex ideas—thought-clusters—in a single word or syllable, is found in all the 
American languages of which we have any knowledge. The primary verb affirms con- 
ditioned or modified existence, specific and restricted action. There is—I speak now 
only of that group of languages to which my studies have been chiefly directed, the 
Algonkin—there is no independent substantive verb; but there are verbs of being under * 
every conceivable condition of time, place, and circumstance. “He is” cannot be 
exactly translated by any Algonkin verb, but every dialect has verbs signifying ‘ he 
is well—or ill,” “he lives,” “he was (and is not),” “he was (and continues to be),” “he 
has himself,’ “he abides,” ‘he remains,” “he is the same as,” “he is of the kind of,” 
“il y a,” ete. 
Every standard vocabulary includes the verb ‘to eat,” yet this verb has not, so 
far as I can discover, its equivalent in any American language. The Algonkin has 
four or five primary and a great many composite verbs of eating, but none of these 
expresses the simple act of taking food, without reference to the manner, mode, sub- 
ject, or object. One verb, for example, signifies “to eat animal food” (or that which 
has or has had life); another, “to eat vegetable food ;” another, “ to eat soft food” (that 
which may be dipped up, spoon-victuals, such as samp, succotash, and the like); others, 
“to eat ravenously, to devour like beasts of prey,” “to graze,” or take food from the 
ground as cattle do, and so on. Others, again, by the insertion of a particle, or by 
receiving a characteristic affix, are made to express the act of eating in company with 
others, of eating enough or satisfying one’s self with food, of eating all that is provided, 
of feasting, ete. 
No Indian language, probably, has any verb which exactly corresponds to the 
English verb “to go,” yet the Indian verbs of motion are almost numberless. There 
are verbs of going by land, by water, by paddle, by sail; of going From the speaker, 
from the place of the action narrated, and from a place other than that of the speaker 
or the action; of going to a, person, place, inanimate object; of going by running, 
jumping, flying, swimming, etc. (and these are not to be confounded with the verbs 
which express the acts of running, jumping, flying, and swimming); of going fast, 
slow, before, after, aslant, in a straight course, by a devious path; and scores of others. 
A special vocabulary of the verbs of motion in any Indian language, giving an analysis 
of each and its precise signification, would be of some real value to philologists; but 
what is to be gained by entering against the English infinitive “‘to go,” in a standard 
vocabulary, some one or another of these Indian verbs of going, the entry carrying its 
own evidence of inaccuracy ? 
The defects of the vocabulary method are still more obvious when we consider 
the nature of Indian names. A peculiar strength of the English language lies in its 
concrete general names, and in the facility with which these names are made to pass 
from the concrete to the abstract. The peculiar excellence of the Indian languages is 
in the nice machinery by which definitions or descriptions of individual objects are made 
to stand for names, and by means of which names which in English are general or 
abstract become individual or concrete. The English abounds with predicates of a 
class or genus; but the Indian noun—verbum nominale—itself predicates a differentia 
or an accidens, occasionally a genus or a species. I say the Indian noun predicates, for 
*Relation de la Nouvelle France en année 1634 (repr. Quebec, 1658, p. 50). 
