134 W. THALBITZER. 
$ 42. — The possessive suffixes (= personal endings), are mostly 
in common and the same for nouns and verbs, but must be design- 
ated differently for both of these classes of words in the event of 
being translated into our languages, in the case of nouns аз ‘ту, your, 
his, our’ etc., in the case of verbs as ‘I, you, he, we’, and in some 
instances (transitive verbs) thus аз ’me, you, him, us’, etc. I refer to my 
systematic account of these numerous endings in my Eskimo Sketch 
S 31, where I have divided them into four groups A, B, C, D. Here 
I shall designate these groups by: «, 8, y, 0 respectively. 
B. VERBS. 
$ 43. General remarks. — All the modes (moods) of the verb 
are inflected with personal suffixes, most of them both with simple 
and with compound suffixes; in the latter besides the subject the 
object also is incorporated, so that e. g. in the imperative mode the 
verb has not only the form ‘see!’, inflected in the singular (‘thou’) and 
plural (‘you’), but also the forms: ‘see me, see us, see him, see them!’ 
etc., each in one word with separate endings for each combination 
of who shall see whom: thou—me, you—me, thou—us, you—us’, 
etc.; and in the interrogative mode other forms: “dost thou see me, 
do you see me, dost thou see him, does he see us”, etc., thus a new 
series of combinations for each mode. By means of a criterion, 
insignificant as to sound, but clear phonetically the special logical — 
constellation is characterized in a different manner for every mode 
so that not only the principal sense of the verb, but also its effect 
and action in the sentence, the person and number and mutual rela- 
tion of its subject and object are plainly expressed in one single word, 
namely the modal character plus a combined suffix. The combinations 
as between the subject ‘I, thou, he’ and the object ‘me, thee, him, 
himself’, etc. (the corresponding in plural) amount in the single mode 
to 52, and as there are three modes where these combinations occur 
of necessity, 1. e. both logically and in reality, we get for their part 
alone 156 combined endings in the conjugation of the verb to indicate 
the grammatical reciprocity of the persons; but there are many more, 
for there are 12 modes altogether. The three modes mentioned have 
the peculiarity in common, that they are always subordinate in the 
sentence and therefore have a special designation of the reflexive 
relation between the subject of the principal proposition and the 
object of the subordinate mode (the participle) in proportion as this 
is identical with or different from the subject, compare in Latin the 
difference between eum and se (and among the possessives ejus and 
suus) — in the following I shall indicate this difference as 3¢ and 4 
