THE DEVELOPMENT OF LANGUAGE. 123 



the Portuguese is from the Roumanian. All these languages — the 

 Lenape (or Delaware), the Micmac, the Massachusetts, the Mohegan, 

 the Ojibway, the Cree, the Miami, the Blackfoot, and the rest — are 

 I'emarkable for their abounding inflections, their subtle distinctions, 

 their facility of composition, and their power of expressing abstx-act 

 ideas. It was Duponceau, the father of American philology, who 

 first brought these qualities to the notice of students more than sixty 

 years ago, in his ])ublished correspondence with the missionary 

 Heckewelder (1816}, in his preface to his translation of Zeisberger's 

 Delaware Grammar (1827), and in his famous ''Memoire" on the 

 subject, which receiAed from the French Institute the " Yolney Prize," 

 in 1835. Fi'om his preface to the Delaware Grammav a few para- 

 graphs may be cited, which will amply coutirm all that I have stated 

 on this cpiestion. After describing their happy mode of forming 

 compound words, he adds : — " They have also many of the forms of 

 the languages which we so much admire — the Latin, Greek, Sansci'it, 

 Slavonic and the rest — mixed with othei'S peculiarly their own. 

 Their conjugations are as regular as those of any language that we 

 knov/, and for the proof of this I need only refer to the numerous 

 paradigms of Delaware verbs that are contained in this grammar, in 

 which will be found the justly admired inflections of the languages of 

 ancient Europe." "There is," he adds '"no shade of idea in respect 

 to the time, place, and manner of action which aix Indian verb cannot 

 express." As an instance, he gives the Delaware phrase for '* if j'ou 

 do not return," and compares it with a similar expression in European 

 tongues. The Delaware is, " mattatsh gluppiweque" which is thus 

 explained : matta is the negative adverb, no ; tsh is the sign of the 

 future, with which the adverb is inflected ; gluppiiueque is the second 

 person plural, in the present subjunctive, of the verb ghqjjnecliton, to 

 return. The sentence thus clearly expresses every idea intended to 

 be conveyed, including both the futurity and the uncertainty. "The 

 Latin phrase, nisi veneris, expresses all these meanings ; but the 

 English, "ifyoir do not come," and the French, " Si vous ne venez 

 jKis" have by no means the same elegant precision. The idea 

 which in Delaware and Latin the subjunctive form conveys directly 

 is left to be gathered in the English and French from the words if 

 and si ; and there is nothing else to point out the futurity of the 

 action. And where the two former languages express everything 



