The language spoken around me is the Chippewa tongue, which, with little variation, is spoken also by the Ottawas, Pottowottomies and Missasaguas, and diffused all over the country of the lakes, and through a population of about seventy thousand. It is in these countries what the French is in Europe, the language of trade and diplomacy, understood and spoken by those tribes, with whom it is not vernacular. In this language Mrs. Schoolcraft generally speaks to her children and Indian domestics. It is not only very sweet and musical to the ear, with its soft inflections and lengthened vowels, but very complex and artificial in its construction, and subject to strict grammatical rules; this, for an unwritten language--for they have no alphabet--appears to me very curious. The particulars which follow I have from Mr. Schoolcraft, who has deeply studied the Chippewa language, and what he terms, not without reason, the philosophy of its syntax. The great division of all words, and the pervading principle of the language, is the distinction into animate and inanimate objects: not only nouns, but adjectives, verbs, pronouns, are inflected in accordance with this principle. The distinction, however, seems as arbitrary as that between masculine and feminine nouns in some European languages. Trees, for instance, are of the animate gender. The sun, moon, thunder and lightning, a canoe, a pipe, a water-fall, are all animate. The verb is not only modified to agree with the subject, it must be farther modified to agree with the object spoken of, whether animate or inanimate: an Indian cannot say simply, I love, I eat; the word must express by its inflection what he loves or eats, whether it belong to the animate or inanimate gender. What is curious enough is, that the noun or name can be conjugated like a verb: the word _man_, for instance, can be inflected to express, I _am_ a man, thou _art_ a man, he _is_ a man, I _was_ a man, I _will be_ a man, and so forth; and the word husband can be so inflected as to signify by a change of syllables, _I have a_ husband, and _I have not_ a husband. They have three numbers, like the Greek, but of different signification: they have the singular, and two plurals, one indefinite and general like ours, and one including the persons or things present, and excluding those which are absent; and distinct inflections are required for these two plurals. There are distinct words to express certain distinctions of sex, as with us; for instance, man, woman, father, mother, sister, brother, are distinct words, but more commonly sex is distinguished by a masculine or feminine syllable or termination. The word _equay_, a woman, is thus used as a feminine termination where persons are concerned. Ogima, is a chief, and Ogimquay, a female chief.