REVIEWS AMERICAN PHILOLOGY. 443 



the verb changes its form to correspond with it, ex. gr. while the 

 sentence " a man saw a bear " would be rendered Enene oo-ge-wah- 

 huh-maun muk-wun the sentence " His father saw a bear " would be in 

 Indian " oo-sun oo-ge-wah-buh-mah-ne muk-wun'^ not oo-ge-wah-buh- 

 maun. None but those who have occasion to address Indians on 

 subjects that require great precision of expression can form any idea 

 of the advantages that this peculiarity gives, or what confusion is 

 produced by ignorance or neglect of it. 



Mr. Schoolcraft's grammatical analysis is as much at fault as his 

 translations from Indian to English, and vice versa, of which we will 

 give a few examples out of very m.any that might be adduced did 

 space permit. 



At page 384 of his second volume, he says of certain nouns " By 

 prefixing ' Tah ' to these words, and changing the inflexion of the ani- 

 mate nouns to e-we, and that of the inanimate to e-wun, they are ren- 

 dered future thus, Tah-Pontiacewe Tah-mittigewun." The principle 

 after which he seems in this passage to be groping, but which he has 

 evidently failed to discover is this, all nouns are capable of being trans- 

 formed into verbs by the addition of " we" for animate forms, " wun" 

 for inanimate with an euphonic or agglutinating vowel, varying in diffe- 

 rent words when the noun to be thus verbalized ends in a consonant 

 thus, en-e-ne a man e-ne-ne-we he is a man, oo-da-nah a town oo da-nak- 

 wun it is a town, or there is a town mah-een-gun a wolf, mah-een-gun- 

 e-we he is a wolf, me-tig a tree, animate) me-tig-oo-we it is a tree ; and 

 being thus verbalized the word becomes capable of all the inflexions of 

 a verb of which the future indicative 3rd person singular made by the 

 prefix Tah, is of course one. These verbalizing aifixes are in reality 

 fragments of the verb ah-we animate, and ah-wun inanimate " he is " 

 "it is " in an identifying sense ; thus it makes but little difference to the 

 sense whether we say "en-e-ne ah-we'' it is a man oa-da-nah ah-wun, it 

 or there is a city, or en-e-ne-we oo-da-nah-wun but in the use of the 

 former the inflecting particles continue with the original verb, in 

 the latter case they belong to the verbalized noun, thus we say tah- 

 e-ne-ne-we but en-e-ne tah-ah-we he will be a man, tah-oo-da-nah-wun 

 but ooda-nah tah-ah-wun, it or there will be a city. 



Mr. Schoolcraft is as much astray in his rules for converting verbs into 

 nouns as we have already shown him to be with regard to those for 

 turning nouns into verbs. At page 390 he says, " their names for the 

 various utensils of civilized life are based on the word "jee-gun " one 



