EXAMPLES.
Achpil, bleibe du (remain thou); achpichtique, wenn sie nicht da sind (if they are not ere); ndahhenap, wir waren gegangen (we had gone); kdahhimo, ihr gehet (you go).
I am, &c.
LETTER X.
MR. HECKEWELDER TO MR. DUPONCEAU.
Bethlehem, 20th June, 1816.
Dear Sir.—Your favors of the 10th and 13th inst. have been duly received. I shall now endeavour to answer the first. The second shall in a few days be attended to.
I am glad to find that you are so much pleased with the forms of our Indian languages. You will be still more so as you become more familiar with the beautiful idiom of the Lenni Lenape. It is certain that many of those forms are not to be found either in the German or English; how it is with the other languages of Europe, Asia, and Africa, I cannot say, not being acquainted with them, and never having made philology my particular study. I concur with you in the opinion that there must be in the world many different ways of connecting ideas together in the form of words, or what we call parts of speech, and that much philosophical information is to be obtained by the study of those varieties. What you observe with regard to the verbs being inflected in lieu of affixing a case or termination to the noun is very correct, but the ground or principle on which it is done, is not perhaps known to you. The verbs in the Indian languages are susceptible of a variety of forms, which are not to be found in any other language that I know. I do not mean to speak here of the positive, negative, causative, and a variety of other forms, but of those which Mr. Zeisberger calls personal, in which the two pronouns, governing and governed, are by means of affixes, suffixes, terminations, and inflections, included in the same word. Of this I shall give you an instance from the Delaware language. I take the verb ahoalan, to love, belonging to the fifth of the eight conjugations, into which Mr. Zeisberger has very properly divided this part of speech.