Page:Archæologia Americana—volume 2, 1836.djvu/275

 APP. NO. I.] GRAMMATICAL NOTICES. 239 CHEROKEE. We are indebted to Mr. Pickering for our first knowledge of the structure and grammatical forms of the Cherokee language. Unfortunately he has published only the com- mencement of his Grammar, of which a very concise outline is here given. We refer for further details to the Grammar itself and to the essay on Indian languages, in the Appendix to the sixth volume of Dr. Lieber's American edition of the " Con- versations-Lexicon," which is understood to have also been written by Mr. Pickering. But we give entire the answers of the Rev. S. A. Worcester to twelve grammatical queries, which were circulated at my request, in the year 1826, by the War Department. They have not been answered from any other quarter. EXTRACTED FROM MR. PICKERING'S GRAMMAR. There is no word corresponding precisely with the English articles a and the. Instead of these the Cherokees use saJcwah, c one ' ; or hiah, ' this ' ; and naslci, or, net, ' that.' These words are indeclinable. The masculine and feminine genders appear to be no other- wise distinguished than by the different names given to the male and female respectively of certain animals, or by using, with the name of the animal, words signifying, male, or female. But the nouns are arranged under the two classes of animate and inanimate beings ; a distinction which is denoted by varied inflections in the plural of nouns, in the inseparable possessive pronouns, and in the verbs. There are three numbers, singular, dual, and plural ; but in nouns the termination is the same for the dual and the plural. The distinction is made by a varied inflection in the inseparable possessive pronouns.* The plural of nouns is formed by the prefixes t, tc, ti, ts, and ani, uni, united to the singular ; the four first being com- monly used in the plurals of inanimate, and the two last in those of the animate class, though not invariably. When an nouns united to the verb.
 * And also, as appears in the essay, in the inseparable personal pro-