Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 8.djvu/258

250 , T. W. DAVENPORT. The language of all cultivated races does not stop with primitive words, but fr*om them, by the aid of prefixes, suf- fixes and inflexions, time and mood and the niceties of thought are expressed with much accuracy. On the other hand, the Indian languages are mainly primitive words and the same word without alteration or addition must do service for noun, verb and adjective. One would infer from such straitened conditions that very little could be accomplished with them. Still this poverty of speech compels the imaginative faculties into active exercise and away from abstract thought. Such a condition is also favorable to the development of idiomatic speech when a combination of words means more than the words themselves taken separately. Cultivated languages have standards for determining their purity, viz., the usage of the best speakers and writers, and the same rule, leaving off the writing, is the standard of purity for the aboriginal tongues. No white man would suppose that an Indian cared anything about the purity of his speech, or that the almost indefinable something we call taste had anything to do with it. That, however, is putting the Indian too low in the scale of esthetic humanity. In every tribe there are purists, who are as much pained by degeneracy and vulgarism in speech as are their educated white brethren ; and no one better than the missionaries know of the fact. At the Umatilla reservation, Howlish Wampo was the standard in all that goes to make an orator pronunciation, inflection, accent, emphasis, natural elocution, etc., and I learned more from him as to the proper pronunciation of In- dian names of persons and places than from all other sources. His own name, pronounced by the whites, Howlish Wampo, with a harsh aspirate and a loud mouth vowel sound, was very different when spoken by him. He gave no aspirate or resounding vowel. It was "Owlish-wan-pun/' accent on the first and third syllables. He said the whites were addicted to harsh pronunciation and gave many instances. Another Cayuse, and the richest of the tribe, was called Tim-te-met-sy. By Wanpun's tongue it was Tin-tin-meet-suh.