204 GEAMMAK OF THE KLAMATH LANGUAGE. 



mythologic i)ieces, will please every student who has ever lent his attentive 

 ear to the well-jxtised periods of Roman historians, and will even evoke 

 comparison with them, not as to their contents, but as to the flow of the 

 well-constructed sentences, which appear in these narratives. 



Oral language is formed of voiced and audible units of thought, called 

 words, which consist of sounds grouped together and possess definite and 

 conventional meanings. To be understood by the tribe, people, or race 

 which converses in it, a language must necessarily follow certain laws, 

 which are partly of a logical, partly of a conventional nature. 



The scope of a scientific grammar therefore consists in presenting these 

 laws: (1) as they manifest themselves in the present status, or some given 

 historic stage of the language, in a S5'stematic form; (2) to deduce these 

 laws from the previous historic status of that language, and from its cog- 

 nate dialects, as well as from the comparative study of other tongues, viz., 

 from the science of linguistics. 



Not only does every language possess a stock of words and idioms 

 peculiar to itself, but also a jieculiar character in its phonetic rules, pro- 

 nunciation, and mode of thought, which impresses itself upon the senses 

 and memory even of persons who have never become familiar with the 

 language, and prompts them to distinguish it readily from other tongues. 

 The causes to which every language owes its peculiar stamp are the om- 

 nipotent climatic influences of the country which the forefathers of the 

 people have inhaljited, and also, wherever migrations have occurred, of 

 the country presently occupied by it. 



Grammars are usually made up of a large number of laws or rules, 

 restrained by an equally large array of exceptions. Manj- of the latter 

 are only apparent and not real exceptions; when they are real, they gen- 

 erally show that conflicting phonetic laws have been at work, or that the 

 principle of grammatic analogy or some other conventional element has 

 prevailed over the logical formative principle of language. Had all lan- 

 guages been evolved through the logical principle alone, grammar would 

 contain rules only and no exceptions. More real and perspicuous regu- 



