Page:Archæologia Americana—volume 2, 1836.djvu/293

APP. NO. I.] GRAMMATICAL NOTICES. MUSKOGH. 257 said that he did not feel sufficient confidence to answer the grammatical queries. The few observations which follow are extracted from his miscellaneous notes to the vocabulary, &ic It appears that some nouns have a plural, such as man, wo- man, boy, girl, child, and that they are formed by the addition of the syllable ukky, ochy, or agy. But, generally speaking, there is no inflection in the nouns denoting plural ; and Mr. Compere says that " whenever ulgy is affixed to any word it always gives it a plural signification." (Ofcla, in Choctaw, sig- nifies multitude, and is also used to designate the plural.) It would also appear that, with the exception of the human species and a few animals, whose sex is distinguished by dis- tinct words, there is no inflection in the Muskogh language to designate genders. Mr. Compere says, " the sentences intended to furnish a clue for the ascertaining the different genders, will, I fear, fail of the object : for neither verbs nor pronouns seem to me capable of such inflections." Women, in few instances, use different words from men. Thus, instead of the words in the vocabulary, they say, for ' my brother,' chachilh wan ; l my elder brother,' chachilhly wan ; 1 my younger brother,' chachilh woochy ; ' my sister,' ty chok Jci ady ; ' my elder sister,' chahlaa ; ' my younger sister,' cha- chrisy ; 'my son ' or ' my daughter,' cha chose wan. (The same difference between the language of men and that of wo- men is found in most of the Indian languages. And it applies uniformly to the same class of words, and to no other.) The degrees of comparison of the adjectives are formed by prefixing for the comparative, sim, sin, or sy, and for the super- lative by adding to the comparative the termination may : ' great,' hlokky ; c greater,' sinhloklcy ; ' greatest,' hlokkymay. 'Good,' hyyhly ; 'better,' syhyyhly ; 'best,' syhyyhlymay. In the first example, the termination may is, for the superlative, added to the positive, and the characteristic of the comparative is dropped ; but this is a rare exception. On the subject of the substantive verb Mr. Compere says, " the word domest, as connected with some of the sentences, between 63 and 71, I believe has precisely the same significa- tion, as the neuter verb to be; but it is defective in almost ev- ery tense, excepting in the present, and even in this, it is not a word of common use. In most cases a word signifying to exist, to live, to stay, to lie down, is used, when we should use the verb, to be" vol. ii. 33