The word _kaiata_, or _oiata_, as already noted, signifies “a living thing, person,” or “body”; _kakonsa_ or _okonsa_, is the “face” or “visage”; and from those come many derivatives. Bruyas gives _gaiata_, “a living thing”; _gaiatare_ (or _kaiatare_) “image,” and as a verb, “to paint.” There is also _gaiatonni_, “a doll” or “puppet,” _i.e._ “a made person,” from _oiata_ and _konnis_, “to make.” From the same root we may probably derive _kiaton_, “to write,” as in the Iroquois Gospels, _wahaiaton_, “wrote”; _kahiaton_, “it is written,” etc. The original meaning was, no doubt, picture-writing, _i.e._ making images of things. In the old Onondaga dictionary of the Jesuit Fathers is the word _kiatonnion_, “I keep writing.” The same authority also gives _guianatonh_ (_kianatonh_), “I paint,” apparently from another root, _oiana_ (_kaiana_) “track, walk, gait,” etc., which has many derivatives. The remarkable compass and minute nicety of expression which the Iroquois grammar had acquired in the various languages of the Six Nations, approximates to the wonderful expansion effected on the crude Anglo-Saxon verb by the evolution of the auxiliaries out of vague active verbs. This has been effected through the habitual resort to oratory as a source of combined action in the councils of the tribes, which constituted one of the most remarkable characteristics of this representative Indian stock. In this respect the expressive flexibility and rhetorical aptitude of the Iroquois languages stand out in striking contrast to the limited compass of grammatical discrimination in those of Europe’s Scandinavian and Teutonic races by whom the Roman empire was overthrown. They had indeed their “tun-moot,” the council meeting of the village community for justice and government; but the deliberations on the moot-hill, though they embodied the germ of all later parliaments, gave birth to no such development of language. It is when entering on the history of the grand constitutional struggle for a free parliament that Carlyle, in quaint irony, exclaims, or assigns to his apocryphal Dryasdust the exclamation: “I have known nations altogether destitute of printers’ types and learned appliances, with nothing better than old songs, monumental stone heaps and quipo-thrums to keep record by, who had truer memory of their memorable things. . . . The English, one can discern withal, have been perhaps as brave a people as their neighbours; perhaps, for valour of action and true hard labour in this earth, since brave peoples were first made in it, there has been none braver any where or any when:—but also, it must be owned, in stupidity of speech they have no fellow!”[146] It suited the purpose of the satirist to ignore for the moment that Shakespeare came of that same speechless race. But in its earlier stage when any comparison with Indian nations is permissible the irony is not extravagant.