1870.] '^^^ [Brill ton. 



Mr. Fleming gives two sounds to a, one as in father, the other as in wasli ; 

 e as a in paper; i as ee in meet ; ai as i in pine; and represents the r by hi, 

 Of course this materially alters his orthography. 



Mr. Buckner makes use of the Agency alphabet, with these changes : ch 

 for c ; i as in pin ; ii as i in pine ; u as in rule ; o as in not ; the Greek w 

 for o as in go ; 6^ as oo in took, foot. These changes, he claims, are nec- 

 cessary to represent the language accurately, but both the natives. and the 

 missionaries have told me this is a mistake. There is really no such sound 

 in Muskokee as o in not, and Buckner' s error arose from the shortening 

 eifect of k after the sound of a, as in rakko, great. Furthermore, the dis- 

 tinction he draws between 6 and u is imaginary, as he himself half con- 

 fesses in a note to p. 22 of his Grammar. As his work is the only at- 

 tempt ever made to display the grammatical structure of the language, it 

 ■will be a service to philology to point out several serious errors into which 

 he has been betrayed. JT am enabled to do this from information furnish- 

 ed me by Mrs. A. E. "W. Eobertson, of the Tallahasse mission, who is ex- 

 cellent authority on the language, and from the unpublished manuscripts 

 of the late Rev. Cyrus Byington, from which I have drawn that which re- 

 lates to the Choctaw. 



III. Remarks on Buckker's "Maskgjkee Grammar." 

 Nouns. The author (p. 52) remarks that common nouns are not varied on ac- 

 count of number ; and that names of people are pluralized by the suffix vlki. 

 The rule should be that most nouns denoting an agent form their plural by 

 adding Ike, as pasv a sweeper, plural pasvlke; some others indicate the plu- 

 ral by adding take, which also forms the plural of pronouns, and in Avriting 

 it is important to distinguish which word is pluralized, as the position of the 

 suffix is in both cases the same; thus, ce wvnv take, your (pi.) sister, but 

 ce wvnvtake, your sisters. 



The declension of the noun is given by Buckner under three headings, 

 the first form, the nominative case, and the objective case. The first 

 form always ends in a vowel, the nom. case in t, the objective in n. The 

 possessive case, he says, is formed by prefixing the possessive pronoun to 

 the thing possessed. Mrs. Robertson divides the cases into nominative, 

 possessive, objective, relative, and vocative. The nominative ends in 

 t, but with "continual exceptions," not for euphonic but for grammatical 

 reasons still obscure. The possessive case is the simple foim of the noun, 

 but requires the possessive pronoun after it, as it did in old English, e. g. 

 "John his hat." The declensions given are as follows : 



Buckner. Mrs. Robertson. 



1st form Cane John 



Nom. Canet Canet 



Object, Canen Canen 



Possessive Cane 



Relative Canen 



Vocative Cane. , 



Cane em eslafkv, John his knife. 

 I think that any attempt to give paradigms of Muskokee nouns in this 



