Page:Archæologia Americana—volume 2, 1836.djvu/218

 18r2 A SYNOPSIS OF THE INDIAN TRIBES. [iNTROD. instead of discriminating brothers and sisters, uncles and aunts, kc.j by the attributes 'elder,' 'younger/ ' paternal,' ' maternal,' fee, they have also distinct names, which have no affinity with those expressive of those qualifications, for 'elder brother,' 'youn- ger brother, 3 ' paternal uncle,' ' maternal uncle,' &ic. In the same manner, when passing, in the pronouns of the two first persons, from the singular to the plural, instead of designating this by a general, indefinite expression, the Indians have all resorted to a dual, or to a specific definite plural ; and, in some languages, they have carefully distinguished the several species of dual, and given distinct names to each species, in the Cherokee and Iroquois, for instance, to thou and I, you two, &ic. The ap- parent confusion in the third person, the want of a word for it in some languages, and its occasional omission in others, may be traced to the same cause ; not to a want of precision, but to the tendency to avoid whatever was not definite and precise. The pronoun of that person is in its nature vague and indefinite, a relative, the proper use of which depends on the structure of the sentence and the skill of the speaker or writer. If, in the Choctaw language, tokcKe equally means, ' to tie,' ' he ties,' 1 he ties him,' and < tie him ' ; and if oMa tolcche means both ' he ties them ' and * they tie him,' it is because, in fact, the pronouns he, him, they, them, are not to be found in the lan- guage. The proper names of the persons, whether subject or object of the action, are used instead of a vague pronoun, ' John ties Peter,' instead of ' he ties him.' And when at last the necessity of a general plural expression was on certain occasions felt, the word okla, which means ' a multitude of men,' 1 a people,' ' a nation,' was adopted as a substitute for the pronoun which was wanted. The third person singular of the verb is accordingly, in several Indian languages, its root, or simplest form. In many languages of the other continent, the process by which the pronoun was incorporated with the verb has reached its last stage. Thus, in the Latin, where it has not been adopted with respect either to the possessive or to the objec- tive case of the personal pronoun, but only in the combination of the nominative case of that pronoun with the verb, there does not remain the slightest trace of affinity between the ter- minations s and t, which, in the active voice of all the verbs, are the signs of the second and third person singular respec- tively, and the separable pronouns of those two persons. Those