The âpédrift of Chief Tobias' letter is highly important to this present work, though his expressions are not couched in the most perfect English. It will be noted that he recognizes the text of the WALUM OLUM to be a native production composed in one of the ancient southern dialects of the tongue, the Unami (Wonami) or the Unalachtgo (Wonalatoko). I shall recur to this when discussing the authenticity of that document on a later page.
The Lenape language is a well-defined and quite pure member of the great Algonkin stock, revealing markedly the linguistic traits of this group, and standing philologically, as well as geographically, between the Micmac of the extreme east and the Chipeway of the far West.
These linguistic traits, common to the whole stock, I may briefly enumerate as follows:--
1. All words are derived from simple, monosyllabic roots, by means of affixes and suffixes.
2. The words do not come within the grammatical categories of the Aryan language, as nouns, adjectives, verbs and other "parts of speech," but are "indifferent themes," which may be used at will as one or the other. To this there appear to be a few exceptions.
3. Expressions of being (_i.e._, nominal themes) undergo modifications depending on the ontological conception as to whether the thing spoken of is a living or a lifeless object. This forms the "animate and inanimate," or the "noble and ignoble" declensions and conjugations. The distinction is not strictly logical, but largely grammatical, many lifeless objects being considered living, and the reverse. This is the only modification of the kind known, true grammatical gender not appearing in any of these tongues.
4. Expressions of action (_i. e._, verbal themes) undergo modifications depending on the abstract assumption as to whether the action is real or conjectural. If the latter, it is indicated by a change in the vowel of the root. This leads to a fundamental division of verbal modes into _positive_ and _suppositive_ modes.
5. The expression of action is subordinate to that of being, so that the verbal elements of a proposition are secondary to the nominal or pronominal elements, and the subjective relation becomes closely akin to, or identical with, that of possession.[157]