Note 53 — SENTENCES.

These are the three Primary Modes, or manners of expressing our thoughts concerning the being, doing, or suffering of a thing. If it comes within our knowledge, we explain it, or make a declaration of it; if we are ignorant or doubtful of it, we make an inquiry about it; if it is not immediately in our power, we express our desire or will concerning it. In Theory therefore the Interrogative form seems to have as good a Title to a Mode of its own, as either of the other two; but Practice has determined it otherwise; and has in all the Languages, with which we are most acquainted, supplied the place of an Interrogative Mode, either by Particles of Interrogation, or by a peculiar order of the words in the sentence. If it be true, as I have somewhere read, that the Modes of the Verbs are more numerous in the Lapland Tongue than in any other, possibly the Laplanders may be provided with an Interrogative Mode.