Ernipta nagligevâtegoot = our son, (he) loves us. The emphatic form:— Angootib erninne nagligeva = the man loves his own son. There are three numbers—singular, dual and plural:—Noonak, a land; noonâk, two lands; noonât, lands; and each of these is declined with different endings to express eight cases translated by the nominative and vocative, and then “of,” “to,” “in,” “through,” “from,” and “like” a land. We feel we are getting on to firm ground somewhere when it is possible to note down such a rule as this: “Nouns in the singular end either in a vowel or in the consonants k and t. The dual always ends in k, and the plural in t.” We must not part with the noun unceremoniously. Its possibilities are not easily exhausted. It must have cost a good deal of thinking, originally, to get it into grammatical harness. For nouns of different kinds have different terminations, which add all sorts of ideas to their isolated meaning. For instance, kut, a family; innuk, an Eskimo; innukut, the family of an Eskimo. Vik, time or place, and kooveasook, rejoicing; hence kooveasookvik, a place of rejoicing. Again, katte, a companion, and nerre, to eat; hence nerrekattega, my table companion, ga being the possessive pronoun. The possessive pronouns, indicated by inflection, include “our two,” “your two,” and “their two.” There is also a possessive emphatic form of the noun, his “own” son. The Eskimo have names for the numerals up to six, after which figure they use a system of addition and multiplication to express number. Seven, for instance, is six and one; nineteen is ten and eight and one. The figure ten is arrived at as being the count of a man’s fingers on two hands; twenty includes his toes. Eighty is translated by “Men four, their extremities finished.” It must indeed have been a matter of some mild philological exhilaration to the first translators when they arrived at such a conclusion as this! Then there are the verbs. This part of speech may be almost called the whole of the Eskimo tongue. It annexes both subject and object, and can express through various particles a sentence which would require in English half a dozen or even ten words. There are two kinds of verbs, transitive and intransitive; three Voices, active, passive, and middle; the usual Moods, of which one—the subjunctive—lends itself to an interesting inferential sort of meaning. When the person addressed can form some idea of what the speaker wants or means, without the use of the principal verb, this moods comes into play: “Because there are no partridges,” is the sentence; “I didn’t get any,” is the inference. “Because I am very hungry” leaves it to be inferred “therefore I want some food.” When this is confined to the obvious, well and good; it would scarcely be so clear, “Because the house is very warm” therefore “you must make it cooler,” unless the conversation took place in a snow house where conviviality was having a disastrous effect on the roof and the walls.