Page:Archæologia Americana—volume 2, 1836.djvu/220

 181 A SYNOPSIS OF THE INDIAN TRIBES. [iNTROD. the action. As the passing of the action, from the agent to the object in which it terminates, is thus expressed by a single won!, the Spanish authors of Indian grammars have designated that species of conjugation by the name of transition. It is common to all the Indian languages, which have been investi- gated. But, although the character is common to all, the prin- ciple does not belong exclusively to them. That, which in that respect characterizes them, is the manner in which the principle has been applied, and which, varying greatly in the different languages, has in some of them been the cause of those countless inflections, which at first excited the wonder of European philologists. Every Hebrew student knows that these transitions exist in that language^ and in a form so simple, as not to cause him any great embarrassment. They are founded on the same principle as in the Indian languages. Abbreviations of the inseparable pronouns become respectively, pronouns possessive by being added as terminations to the noun, and the objective case of the personal pronoun by being in the same manner added to the verb. Other distinct abbreviations represent the nominative case of the same pronoun ; and as, in the compound conjugation, the abbreviated form of the pronoun in the objective case always follows that in the nominative case, and there are also distinctive variations between the sin- gular and the plural of each, the whole process unites precision with simplicity. It diners no otherwise from the conjugation in the English language, so far as pronouns are concerned, than in the collocation of the pronoun, and in the pronuncia- tion in one word instead of three. They say, lovlthee, in one word, instead of J love thee in three words ; and the number of inflections, or combinations of inflections, required for the purpose, is the same with that of the words, which we use in order to attain the same object, (i, thou, me, thee, we, us, he.) The system is nearly the same in the Choctaw. The fol- lowing table exhibits the pronouns, personal separable in the first column ; united with verbs in the nominative case in the second ; possessive united with the nouns designating the parts of the body, and used also (as in Hebrew) as the objective case, when united with verbs.