the first importance I would mention the prominence they assign to
pronouns and pronominal forms. Indeed, an eminent linguist has been so
impressed with this feature that he has proposed to classify them
distinctively as "pronominal languages." They have many classes of
pronouns, sometimes as many as eighteen, which is more than twice as
many as the Greek. There is often no distinction between a noun and a
verb other than the pronoun which governs it. That is, if a word is
employed with one form of the pronoun it becomes a noun, if with another
pronoun, it becomes a verb.

We have something of the same kind in English. In the phrase "I love,"
love is a verb; but in "my love," it is a noun. It is noteworthy that
this treatment of words as either nouns or verbs, as we please to employ
them, was carried further by Shakespeare than by any other English
writer. He seemed to divine in such a trait of language vast resources
for varied and pointed expression. If I may venture a suggestion as to
how it does confer peculiar strength to expressions, it is that it
brings into especial prominence the idea of Personality; it directs all
subjects of discourse by the notion of an individual, a living, personal
unit. This imparts vividness to narratives, and directness and life to
propositions.

Of these pronouns, that of the first person is usually the most
developed. From it, in many dialects, are derived the demonstratives and
relatives, which in Aryan languages were taken from the third person.
This prominence of the _Ego_, this confidence in self, is a trait of the
race as well as of their speech. It forms part of that savage
independence of character which prevented them coalescing into great
nations, and led them to prefer death to servitude.

Another characteristic, which at one time was supposed to be universal
on this continent, is what Mr. Peter S. Du Ponceau named
_polysynthesis_. He meant by this a power of running several words into
one, dropping parts of them and retaining only the significant
syllables. Long descriptive names of all objects of civilized life new
to the Indians were thus coined with the greatest ease. Some of these
are curious enough. The Pavant Indians call a school-house by one word,
which means "a stopping-place where sorcery is practised;" their notion
of book-learning being that it belongs to the uncanny arts. The Delaware
word for horse means "the four-footed animal which carries on his back."