Vestiges of the natural history of creation / [Anon].

  • Robert Chambers
Date:
1844
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Vestiges of the natural history of creation / [Anon]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    301/408 page 293
    word, on examination, is found to be made up in this manner: &, the second personal pronoun ; «li, part of the word wulet, pretty ; gat, part of the word wichgat, signifying a leg or paw; schis, conveying the idea of littleness. In the same tongue, a youth is called pilape, a word compounded from the first part of pilsit, imocent, and the latter part of lenape, a man. ‘Thus, it will be observed, a number of parts of words are taken and thrown together, by a process which has been happily termed agglutination, so as to form one word, con- veying a complicated idea. There is also an ela- borate system of inflection; in nouns, for instance, there is one kind of inflection to express the presence or absence of vitality, and another to express number. The genius of the language has been described as accumulative: it ‘tends rather to add syllables or letters, making farther distinctions in objects already before the mind, than to introduce new words.”* Yet it has also been shewn very distinctly, that these languages are based in words of one syllable, like those of the Chinese and Polynesian families; all the primary ideas are thus expressed: the elaborate system of inflection and agglutination is shewn to * Schooleraft.
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