ATTRIBUTIVE VERB. 427 



voice. There are a number of verbs which are transitives and intransitives 

 at the same time, as k'lekjila to lose children and to he at the point of death. 



The distributive form of intransitive verbs may refer to severalty or 

 repetition of the act, state, or quality expressed by the verb, but it does also, 

 and much more frequently, refer to verbal acts performed or states under- 

 gone by a plurality of subjects, and in this latter case it corresponds to the 

 plural of the English verb. 



A special class among the intransitive verbs is the attributive verbs 

 which indicate some quality or attribute of the subject, and in the languages 

 of modern Europe are generally circumscribed by the substantive verb to 

 he, accompanied by an adjective noun. In a large number of agglutinative 

 languages attributive verbs are a prominent feature, since they make a 

 predicative verb of what we consider to be simply an adjective or attribute 

 joined to the verb to he, and express by a single term what we can render 

 only by a combination of two or three words. What we call an adjective 

 is, in those languages, a verbal or participle of that attributive verb. So, in 

 the Creek, the grass is green, pahit lanis, is, literally, "the grass greens", or 

 "the grass is greening"; while green grass is palii lani, which comes nearest 

 to a term like "grass greened," or "grass greening." Here the adjective, 

 whether used predicatively or attributively, is always a form of a verb; but 

 in Klamath there are true adjectives, recognizable by their endings (-kni, -li, 

 -ni, -ptchi, etc.), and liable to become connected with the verb gi; and, 

 besides, there are attributive verbs of the sort just pointed out by an example 

 from the Creek language. These attributive verbs appear in a verbal finite 

 form when used predicatively, and in the participial form in -tko when 

 employed attributively. 



The two classes of the intransitive verb present themselves in the fol- 

 lowing manner: 



A. — The non-attributive intransitive verb describes an act performed by 

 an animate subject, or a state undergone by, a quality belonging to an ani- 

 mate or inanimate subject. If connected with an object, this object is al- 

 ways an indirect one. 



k^dsha, d. k^k'tcha to grow (plants). 



k'ldka to reach, to turn into; to die. 



