gilfillan on ojibwe

I've spent a fair proportion of today reading what Gilfillan has to say about the Ojibwe language. In the late 1880s he prepared an essay on the subject for publication at the invitation of Henry Whipple, the Episcopalian Bishop of Minnesota. He spends quite a lot of the paper explaining how complex the Ojibwe verbal system is, with a wide range of forms expressing all kinds of distinctions that are not marked grammatically in English. And he confesses that this state of affairs has taken him by surprise:

To one studying the language it is a matter of extreme astonishment how such a rude people ever constructed such a highly inflected system of speech for expressing every thought of the mind with such delicacy and the slightest variation in a shade of meaning, or how they have ever handed it down among themselves, even if originally made and given to them. As a clergyman once expressed it to the writer, that is as much a surprise as it would be to find a beautifully sculptured Corinthian temple, with all its delicate carving, standing on one of our bare prairies. Yet a child, even, who does not know a letter and has never heard of grammar will use those forms with accuracy, and any step outside the grammatical rule will be instantly detected.

Later he considers the question of whether Ojibwe can function as a vehicle for the expression of Christian doctrine and, again, he begins by anticipating the reader's prejudices:

It might be thought that having been constructed and used by a rude nation of hunters the language would be an insufficient vehicle of religious truth, employed on a new and strange subject of which its constructors never thought. But it is found to be a perfectly adequate vehicle by which to express any religious truth, however lofty or subtile. The Epistles of St. Paul, for instance, which strain all language to express the ideas which were struggling in his mind for utterance, and which sometimes deal with things above the region of sense and of all ideas of men in this world so that they are a critical test of the capacity of any language to express them, those sometimes lofty flights of his above all language of earth, almost into things of a to us incomprehensible sphere, are yet found to be as capable of expression in the language of the Ojibways as in our own, or the Greek in which they were written. Yes; from the wonderful precision and delicate shades of meaning obtained by the nice distinction and almost innumerable inflections of the Ojibway, it often seems to possess a superiority in conveying definite religious ideas to the mind.

Eve: I may be wrong but I have a feeling that, in your book about Ojibwe hymn-singing, the author quotes the guy who re-translated the Ojibwe hymns into English and he says something that is almost the opposite of this. I *think* he says something about Ojibwe leaving meaning open in a way that is particularly conducive to religious discourse?