REVIEWS AMERICAN PHILOLOGY. 441 



" it is elevated ground," and consequent on this blunder the still greater 

 one of giving as its plural a word that does not exist in the language : 

 there is no word to express " hill " as distinguished from " mountain," 

 the diminutive form of this latter word being used for that purpose. 



Mr. Schoolcraft is decidedly wrong in saying that the numeral 

 " pazh-ik (one) represents the English indefinite article ; it is never 

 so used, hut, with very few exceptions, wherever it occurs, it is in its 

 proper numeral sense. In the phrase that he adduces as an example 

 '' pa-zhik muk-wun ooge-wah-buh-maun" it means that he saw one 

 bear, not two or many. The Indian for " he saw a bear " without 

 the idea of number would be simply " oo-ge-wah-huh-maun muk-wun ;" 

 indeed Mr. Schoolcraft himself unwittingly furnishes us with an 

 example which disproves his own rule, for a little after (page 372), he 

 give us, for "he or she loves a man" a sentence precisely similar to 

 "he killed a bear" " oo-sah ge-aun en-ne-ne-wun" showing that in 

 his former sentence pa-zhik is not an indefinite article but a numeral 

 adjective. The nearest approach that pa-zhik ever makes to the 

 signification of an indefinite article is to be found in the very few 

 instances in which it occurs in the sense of the Greek enclitic rts — a 

 certain one. 



V/e look Upon Mr. Schoolcraft's observations on the possessive of 

 substantives as very unphilosophical and very incorrect, inasmuch as 

 they ignore a very interesting and important feature of the language, 

 namely, that it makes modification of the sense of words by a double 

 agglutination of particles — a prefix and an aflSx — both of which are ab- 

 solutely necessary to the additional idea and one of which without the 

 other would add nothing to the meaning of the original word, thus '' pe- 

 zhe-ke" '\% a bison, '"' ne-pe-zhe-keem" my bison, but ne-pe-zhe-kee would 

 have no meaning, neither would pe-zhe-keem, both the prefix and afiix 

 being abolutely necessary in order that the word should come before 

 us in its possessive form. But one unacquainted with the language 

 would gather from Mr. Schoolcraft's observations that it is the affix 

 alone that imparts the possessive meaning ; he might as well attempt 

 to divide the h from the « in the English possesive his " as to think of 

 giving to an Ojibwa noun a possessive meaning without the prefix as 

 well as the afiix. 



His remark on the third person singular possessive form is equally 

 open to objection, " mun" being in that case just as much part of the 

 possessive as is the terminal m of the first and second persons, and 



DD 



