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 grave and important subjects, the other ignoble, or trivial, for familiar or vulgar ones. But this distinction is not so much with them, as with us, marked by a difference of words, but of terminations. Thus, when they are treating of solemn, or weighty matters, they terminate the verb and the noun by another inflexion, than what is used for trivial or common conversation. I do not know, whether I explain clearly enough to you this so material a point of their elocution; but it makes itself clearly distinguished, when once one comes to understand the language, in which it supplies the place of the most pathetic emphasis, though even that they do not want, nor great expression in their gestures and looks. All their conjugations are regular and distinct.