t and shares its labours--viz., Zi, to stay or repose. Thus
Ya enters into the future tense, and Zi in the preterite of all verbs
requiring auxiliaries. Yam, I shall go--Yiam, I may go--Yani-ya, I shall
go (literally, I go to go), Zam-poo-yan, I have gone (literally, I
rest from gone). Ya, as a termination, implies by analogy, progress,
movement, efflorescence. Zi, as a terminal, denotes fixity, sometimes in
a good sense, sometimes in a bad, according to the word with which it
is coupled. Iva-zi, eternal goodness; Nan-zi, eternal evil. Poo (from)
enters as a prefix to words that denote repugnance, or things from
which we ought to be averse. Poo-pra, disgust; Poo-naria, falsehood,
the vilest kind of evil. Poosh or Posh I have already confessed to be
untranslatable literally. It is an expression of contempt not unmixed
with pity. This radical seems to have originated from inherent sympathy
between the labial effort and the sentiment that impelled it, Poo being
an utterance in which the breath is exploded from the lips with more or
less vehemence. On the other hand, Z, when an initial, is with them a
sound in which the breath is sucked inward, and thus Zu, pronounced Zoo
(which in their language is one letter), is the ordinary prefix to words
that signify something that attracts, pleases, touches the heart--as
Zummer, lover; Zutze, love; Zuzulia, delight. This indrawn sound of
Z seems indeed naturally appropriate to fondness. Thus, even in our
language, mothers say to their babies, in defiance of grammar, "Zoo
darling;" and I have heard a learned professor at Boston call his wife
(he had been only married a month) "Zoo little pet."

I cannot quit this subject, however, without observing by what slight
changes in the dialects favoured by different tribes of the same race,
the original signification and beauty of sounds may become confused and
deformed. Zee told me with much indignation that Zummer (lover) which in
the way she uttered it, seemed slowly taken down to the very depths of
her heart, was, in some not very distant communities of the Vril-ya,
vitiated into the half-hissing, half-nasal, wholly disagreeable, sound
of Subber. I thought to myself it only wanted the introduction of 'n'
before 'u' to render it into an English word significant of the last
quality an amorous Gy would desire in her Zummer.

I will but mention another peculiarity in this language which gives
equal force and brevity to its forms of expression