| imi | = | I | sheghi or paghi | = | we |
| aki | = | thou | taghi | = | you |
| ema | = | he or she | emaghi | = | they |
When immediately before a verb these were abbreviated into I or it, a or ac, e or ei, pa or pag, ta or tag, e or et—I, thou, he or she, we, you, they, according to their preceding a vowel or a consonant. With words beginning with a consonant only the first syllable of the pronoun was used.
The verb itself did not vary in the various persons, but it did vary in its tenses by suffixes, sometimes after the pronoun, sometimes after the verb. In the present tense the Bororos generally used for the purpose the word nure, usually between the pronoun and the verb, with the pronoun occasionally repeated after the nure; but in general conversation, which was laconic, the pronoun was frequently suppressed altogether—similarly to the frequent omission of the pronoun in the English telegraphic language.
There were various other forms of pronouns, but I could not quite define their absolute use—such as the tched or tcheghi, which seemed to include everybody, corresponding to the English we in orations which includes the entire audience, or the whole nation, or even the entire human race.
The Bororo language was complete enough, the conjugation of verbs being clearly defined into past, present, imperative and future.
The past was formed by interpolating between the pronoun and verb the words re gurai, generally abbreviated into re. The imperative was made chiefly by the accentuation of the words, and was susceptible of inflexion in the second person singular and plural. The future was formed by adding, sometimes after the pronoun, sometimes after the verb, the words modde, uo, or ua.
At the end of the second volume, in the Appendix, will be found a vocabulary of useful words needed in daily conversation which I collected during my visit to the Bororos. I had made a much more complete dictionary of their language, in a book which I kept for the purpose, but unfortunately the book was lost with a great many other things in an accident I had some months later on the Arinos River.
It was not possible to say that the Bororos shone in intelligence. It was seldom one found an individual who could count beyond two. Everything in the Bororo country was reckoned in couples—with the aid of fingers, thumbs, and toes. The learned could thus reach up to twenty, or ten pair—but beyond twenty no Bororo dared venture in his calculations. They had no written language, no sculptures or paintings, no carved idols. Their artistic talent seemed limited to occasionally incising rudimentary representations of horns, footprints, and line figures on rocks.
They showed great skill in the manufacture of their arrows, which were indeed constructed on most scientific lines, and were turned out with wonderful workmanship. The arrows were from 4 to 5 ft. long, and were chiefly remarkable for the intelligent and highly scientific disposition of the two balancing parrot feathers, gently bent into a well-studied spiral curve, so as to produce a rotary movement, united with perfect balance, in the travelling weapon. The arrows were manufactured out of hard, beautifully polished black or white wood, and were provided with a point of bamboo one-third the length of the entire arrow. That bamboo point was tightly fastened to the rod by means of a careful and very precisely made contrivance of split cane fibre.