Page:Archæologia Americana—volume 2, 1836.djvu/257

 APP. NO. I.] GRAMMATICAL NOTICES. DELAWARE. 221 from verbs active, neuter, or passive, and some assume the character of participles. Others are formed of two substantives together, or a substantive with a verb or adjective. Diminu- tives are formed by the suffix tit (in the animate gender. In the inanimate, the termination es is used. Schis applies to (parts of) little animals. Thus the word Jculigatschis, ' thou pretty little paw,' addressed to a pet dog, is derived from Jc, ' thou ' ; wulit, 'pretty ' ; wichgat, ' leg' or ' paw ' ; and schis, the diminutive form. — ■ Mr. Du Ponceau.) Adjectives are mostly verbs, which, though not inflected through all the persons, have tenses. The adjectives proper end in uwi and owi, and are sometimes derived from substan- tives or from verbs. The comparative is expressed by allowiwi, 'more'; and the superlative by eluwi, 'most.' (The author hesitated whether he should class adjectives by themselves, or include them all under the head of verbs. He has given no rule to discriminate pure adjectives from adjective verbs. — Mr. Du ponceau.) Genders are not distinguished as masculine and feminine, but as animate and inanimate. Trees and large plants belong to the former, annual plants and grasses to the latter. Adjectives of the former class generally end in t, of the latter in k. The feminine of the human species and of some quadrupeds is desig- nated by several distinct words. The masculine of beasts is generally expressed by the word lennowechum ; the female of quadrupeds by ochqucchum, of birds by ochquehelleu. Numerals, when connected with substantives, assume the ter- mination ale for animate and ol for inanimate objects. Personal pronouns either separable or inseparable, but much more frequently used in the latter form. The separable pro- nouns are, ni, 7, I ki, thou, I neka or nekama, he, she, it. kiluna or niluna, we, kiluna, you, | nekamawa, they. The inseparable pronouns are, in both numbers, n 3 for the first, &' for the second, w' for the third person. When two pronouns are employed in verbs, the last or pronoun governed is express- ed by an inflection. The possessive pronoun is the same as the personal, separable and inseparable. The personal pronoun combines itself also with the conjunction nepe, ' also.' Nepe, ' I also'; kepe, 'thou also'; nepena or Icepena, '-we also,' (as the word is used in a general or particular sense. The par- ticular plural refers to a certain description of persons ; as, ' we