and are of the same way of thinking and acting.

But to arrive at any tolerable degree of conjecture, whence these people
derive their origin own myself at a loss: possibly some light might be
got into it, by discovering whether there was any affinity or not
between their language, and that of the Orientalists, as the Chinese or
Tartars. In the mean time, the abundance of words in this language
surprized, and continues to surprize me every day the deeper I get into
it. Every thing is proper in it; nothing borrowed, as amongst us. Here
are no auxiliary verbs. The prepositions are in great number. This it is
that gives great ease, fluency, and richness to the expression of
whatever you require, when you are once master enough to join them to
the verbs. In all their absolute verbs they have a dual number. What we
call the imperfect, perfect, and preter-perfect tenses of the indicative
mood, admits, as with us, of varied inflexions of the terminations to
distinguish the person; but the difference of the three tenses is
express, for the preter-perfect by the preposition _Keetch_; for the
preter-pluperfect by _Keetch Keeweeh_: the imperfect is again
distinguished from them by having no preposition at all.

They have no feminine termination, either for the verbs or nouns. This
greatly facilitates to me my composition of songs and hymns for them,
especially as their prose itself naturally runs into poetry, from the
frequency of their tropes and metaphors; and into rhime, from their
nouns being susceptible of the same termination, as that of the words in
the verbs which express the different persons. In speaking of persons
absent, the words change their termination, as well in the nouns as in
the verbs.

They have two distinctions of style; the one noble, or elevated, for