Page:Archæologia Americana—volume 2, 1836.djvu/211

 SECT. VI.] INDIAN LANGUAGES. 175 the act of dying is alone implied. But if we intend to ex- press the state, in which that act places the person, we must recur to the substantive verb and say, ' He is dead.' I may not have expressed the difference with sufficient perspicuity ; and the line of distinction between the cases, where we use an intransitive, and those in which we must resort to the substan- tive verb, is not perhaps always accurately drawn in the language. It is sufficient for our purpose to say, that in all the cases, where we use the verb to be, in connexion with an attribute, or with a noun, the Indians use an intransitive verb ; and that where we use it in connexion with the participle past, they substitute an inflection. Thus the passive voice in the Indian languages is, as in the simple tenses of the Latin, formed by an inflection, consisting generally of the insertion of a par- ticle, such as xi, ssi, in the Delaware, ull in the Choctaw, &tc* And, instead of saying, ' I am cold,' ' I am sick,' ' I am a man,' &c, they say, I cold, I sick, I man, &c. These various expressions are, each of them, an intransitive verb conjugated through all its persons, tenses, and moods. The only differ- ence is, that, in all those cases, it is the substantive verb which we conjugate ; whilst the Indian conjugates what we call the adjective and even the noun itself, in the same manner as he does other intransitive verbs. We find, in the Latin language, several instances of similar neuter or deponent verbs such as sitio, esurio, regroto, &c, which we cannot render into English, without resorting to the substantive verb. The Indian does, in every instance, that which in Latin occurs only in some cases ; and he extends the principle to nouns and even to proper names. When the process is applied to a noun, the noun undergoes the inflexion proper to the verb. Thus in the Micmac, from lenno, 'a man,' is derived the verb, n'looi, 'I am a man,' the conjugation of which will be found in the Appendix. But the adjective, which, according to our habits, we should consider as converted into a verb, appears in the Indian languages, as if it were the simplest form of the verb. In most cases, the word he is cold, or it is cold, is found to be identical with what we languages is formed by an inflexion, not of the verb, but of the pro- noun ; and, in the Choctaw, the objective case of the pronoun is used, beside the inserted particle.
 * 1) The passive voice in the Onondago and probably other Iroquois