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EMOTIONAL AND IMITATIVE LANGUAGE.

beyond five they say it is ka-o-o-oki, by which they evidently mean it is a very great many. The Cauixanas in one vocabulary are described as saying lawauugabi for four, and drawling out the same word for five, as if to say 'a long four,' in somewhat the same way as the Aponegicrans, whose word for six is itawuna, can expand this into a word for seven, itawuūna, obviously thus meaning a 'long six.' In their earlier and simpler stages nothing can be more easy to comprehend than these, so to speak, pictorial modifications of words. It is true that writing, even with the aid of italics and capitals, ignores much of this symbolism in spoken language, but every child can see its use and meaning, in spite of the efforts of book-learning and school-teaching to set aside whatever cannot be expressed by their imperfect symbols, nor controlled by their narrow rules. But when we try to follow out to their full results these methods, at first so easy to trace and appreciate, we soon find them passing out of our grasp. The language of the Sahaptin Indians shows us a process of modifying words which is far from clear, and yet not utterly obscure. These Indians have a way of making a kind of disrespectful diminutive by changing the n in a word to l; thus twinwt means 'tailless,' but to indicate particular smallness, or to express contempt, they make this into twilwt, pronounced with an appropriate change of tone; and again, wana means 'river,' but this is made into a diminutive wala by 'changing n into l, giving the voice a different tone, putting the lips out in speaking, and keeping them suspended around the jaw.' Here we are told enough about the change of pronunciation to guess at least how it could convey the notions of smallness and contempt. But it is less easy to follow the process by which the Mpongwe language turns an affirmative into a negative verb by 'an intonation upon, or prolongation of the radical vowel,' tŏnda, to love, tŏ̱nda, not to love; tŏndo, to be loved, tŏ̱ndo, not to be loved. So Yoruba, bába, 'a great thing,' bàba, 'a small thing,' contrasted in a proverb, 'Baba bo, baba molle' — 'A great