THE VERB A NOUN-VERB. 573 



expression ? It should be remembered here that, at tlie earliest period of 

 its existence, language possessed neither nouns nor verbs, but that these 

 distinctions arose only gradually. Whenever the aboriginal mind wanted 

 to give a nominal character to a radix, it affixed certain pronominal roots 

 to ir, considered to signify numbei-, location, sex, etc.; when a radix had to 

 receive a verbal or assertive meaning, pronominal affixes, pointing to tense, 

 mode, person, form, location, and other categories, were placed before or 

 after it * Bat in thus establishing relation, every nation or tribe followed 

 different methods ; and thus originated, not the genealogical differences of 

 languages, but the difference of their grammatic structure. Different meth- 

 ods were followed because each nation was in the habit of viewing things 

 from different logical or conventional aspects. 



The Klamath verb apinoachcs the predicative Aryan and Semitic verb 

 in the following features: 



a. In what we call the finite forms, the verb is connected with a per- 

 sonal pronoun, figuring as the grammatic subject of the sentence, and not 

 with a possessive pronoun, as found in the Algonkin dialects and many 

 other American and foreign languages, in the place of a subject, which is 

 there only the logical, not the grammatic, subject of the sentence. This 

 latter stage is represented in Klamath by some of the verbals, but these are 

 pure nominal forms, and do not exhibit such forms as correspond to our 

 finite verb. 



h. The majority of the verbal inflectional affixes differ from those used 

 in inflecting the noun. The process of incorporating pronominal objects 

 into the verb is here in the same stage as in some modern languages of 

 Europe, viz., only in its beginning. 



c. Klamath clearly distinguishes between the subjective and the objec- 

 tive case in the adjective, the past participle, the pronoun, and the substan- 

 tive of the animate order, the objective case standing for the direct as well 

 as the indirect object. The objective case is formed by the suffix -sh, -s 

 with a vowel preceding, but the usual suffix of the subjective case in sub- 

 stantives is -sh, -s also. 



* For further Uiscussiou of this topic, cf. page 253 of this Grammar. 



