354 
MISSION TO ASHANTEE. 
sive is expressed by a circiimlocutiorij as he loves, or they love me, 
for 1 am loved, &c.* It appears erroneous to consider the infinitive 
mood as the root of the verb, when it has a separable or distinguish- 
ing termination, and mong is as distinctly the verbalizing adjunct 
in the Accra language, as ere or are in the Latin, s<v in Greek, or 
an in the Anglo-Saxon. If w;e consider the imperative as the 
divested fundamental form of the verb, it is still difficult in these 
languages to get at the root, for the use of the infinitive for the im- 
perative, occasional in the Greek, is, in the Accra, so general, that 
for some time I thought it unexceptionable, and that it had not the 
two moods. 
The Accra has the neuter verb to he in the present, perfect, and 
future tenses, but in the perfect, it is irregular. 
I am I have been I shall be 
meyeh metay mahyeh 
The Fantee only has it in the present, oh yea, he is."" It is re- 
markable that even the linguists of our forts, who speak English 
fluently, never understand or use our neuter verb to be, but sub- 
stitute live for it, and that, whether they speak of animate or 
inanimate things ; a servant would say, " your keys live in your 
pocket.'" 
The imperative mood has a present tense complete in each 
language. 
They express the potential mood by adding auxihary verbs, such 
as our can, may, &c., have been shewn to be derived from. 
The termination of the infinitive in the Accra is generally mong^ 
* " The distinction of active and passive is not essential to verbs. In the infancy of 
language, it was in all probabihty not known ; in Hebrew, the difference but imperfectly 
exists, and in the early periods of it, possibly did not exist at all. In Arabic, the only 
distinction which obtains, arises from the vowel points, a late invention^com^pared with the 
antiquity of that language. And in our own tongue the names of active and passive would 
have remained unknown, if they had not been learnt in Latin." Jones. 
