Page:Archæologia Americana—volume 2, 1836.djvu/202

 166 A SYNOPSIS OF THE INDIAN TRIBES. [iNTROD. principally to age and consanguinity ; such as, father and mother, sou and daughter, man and woman, hoy and girl, &c. ; and also distinct names for the male and female of various animals. But, if the grammatical distinction of gender be understood, as applying exclusively to the varied inflections by which it is designated, the Eskimaux,the Choctaws, the Muskhogees, and, it is believed, the Sioux, having no inflection of that description, may, in that sense, be said to make no distinction between gen- ders. And the languages of the Iroquois family afford the only instance, as yet discovered, of such a distinction between the masculine and the feminine. Father Brebeuf pointed it out,* in the third person of both the singular and the plural of the Huron, or Wyandot: ihaton, 1 he says'; iouaton, ' she says' ; ihonton, 'they say (the men)' ; ionton, ' they say (the women)'. The same distinction and applied to the same person is found in Zeisberger's Grammar of the Onondago, a language of the same family : waharrie, e he beats'; iagorrie, l she beats'; hottirrie, 'they (the men) beat' ; guetirrie, ' they (women) beat.' And we find it again in the specimen of the conjugation of the verb " to eat," in the Mo- hawk, another Iroquois language.! 1° a ^ these cases the inflection is that of the pronoun of the third person. Zeisberger also discovered it in some Onondago nouns, where, as well as in the pronoun of that dialect, it is generally expressed by pre- fixing or inserting the sound g : sajadat, ' a male ' ; sgajadat, ' a female.' A much more prevailing distinction is that between animate beings and inanimate things. It is not, however, universal, since it does not exist in the Eskimau, the Choctaw, the Musk- hogee, and the Caddo, and has not, as yet, been discovered in any other of our Indian languages than the Iroquois, the Cherokee, and the Algonkin-Lenape. Our information respecting the Iroquois is very limited ; and we can say little more than that the distinction is made. The only notice taken of it in Zeisberger's Onondago Grammar is (when speaking of the prefixed letters by which, in some cases, the feminine are distinguished from masculine nouns), in these words, " Nouns of inanimate objects have no prefixes and f See Appendix, verbal forms; and do. and grammatical notices of Zeisberger.
 * See his letter of July, 1636, in the Appendix,