448 REVIEWS — AMERICAN PHILOLOGY. 



pres. 2d sing, passive, from which coincidence of sound, however, no 

 inconvenience is ever felt, seeing that the context of the word at once 

 determines in what sense it is used. Thus explained, it is evident 

 that the word Wa-yoo-se-me-goo-yun, thou who art our father, is 

 exactly the word required to express the "Our Father" of the Lord's 

 prayer. Noosa, which Mr. Schoolcraft seems to prefer, being mani- 

 festly inappropriate to the form and subversive of the very spirit of 

 that prayer, it never meaning any thing but " my father," not " our 

 father." 



In a treatise containing so much that is erroneous both in 

 principle and detail, it is difficult to select subjects for comment, 

 seeing that in a paper confined within such narrow limits as the present, 

 so much must be left untouched ; but we will select another instance 

 from the chapter on pronouns as illustrative of the very unphilosophical 

 principles of etymology adopted by Mr. Schoolcraft ; at page 408 he 

 derives the verb ah-we, first person singular auio (is, am, in an identi- 

 fying sense) from "yow," the radix of we-yow, "his body," and 

 then translates " nin-dauio" I am a man; ah-we, "he is a man;" 

 whereas nothing can be more erroneous than such etymology nor 

 anything more incorrect than the interpretation that he grounds on it. 

 To derive auw, am; ah-we, is, from " yow," body, is just as if the 

 Greek and Latin verbs ct/At and sum were asserted to be derived from 

 the Greek crwixa, a body, a derivation too far-fetched for even the most 

 fanciful of the old lexicographers. We would adduce many other 

 instances in which mere similarity of sound is the only basis on which 

 Mr. Schoolcraft builds abstruse, and, to the iminitiated, learned- 

 looking etymological dissertations. On the assumption of the sup^ 

 posed connexion between yow, body, and nin-dauw, I am, he inter- 

 prets nin-dauio, I am a man ; ah-we, he is a man, which is a total mis- 

 representation, the signification of these words being simply " I am," 

 " He is " (not in the sense of existence, which would be nin-dah-yah, ah' 

 yah, but of identification) ; for a proof of which, appreciable by those 

 who do not understand the language, we have not to go beyond Mr. 

 Schoolcraft's own book, at page 469 of the second volume of which, 

 at the end of the Algonquin vocabularies, we find a translation of 

 the mysterious and awful formula in which the Divine Being defines 

 his own existence, " 1 am that I am," all of which vocabularies give 

 mn-dauw as the word for " I am," which would be singularly inappro- 



