Page:Archæologia Americana—volume 2, 1836.djvu/196

 160 A SYNOPSIS OF THE INDIAN TRIBES. [iNTROD, SECTION VI. INDIAN LANGUAGES. The vocabularies appended to this essay will enable the reader to judge, whether the preceding classification of the Indian languages is correct. Those of the Mohawk, Seneca, Cherokee, Muskhogee, Choctaw, and Caddo, were prepared according to a model circulated by the War Department at the request of the author of this essay. But, in framing a general comparative vocabulary, the selection of the words was controlled by the existing materials ; and many have been omitted, because they were found only in a few of the vocabu- laries, either manuscript, or already published, which could be obtained. It happens, however, that the greater number of words of which we have the equivalents in most Indian langua- ges, belong to that class, which has generally been considered as so absolutely necessary in any state of society, that the words of which it consists must have been in use everywhere in its earliest stages, and could not have been borrowed by any nation from any otheri Whenever therefore a sufficient num- ber of words of that description have been found to be the same or similar in two or more languages, such languages have generally been considered as of the same stock, and the nations which spoke them, as having belonged to the same family, subsequent to the time when mankind was divided into distinct nations. The same principle has been adopted in the classification of the Indians ; and its correctness has been proved in every instance, where it had been previously ascer- tained, by the unanimous testimony of the missionaries, traders, and interpreters, that two or more languages were certainly dialects of the same, or kindred tongues. But such is the tendency of languages, amongst nations in the hunter state, rapidly to diverge from each other, that, apart from those primitive words, a much greater diversity is found in Indian languages, well known to have sprung from a common source, than in kindred European tongues. Thus, although the Minsi were only a tribe of the Delawares and adjacent to them, even some of their numerals differed. It is proper however to ob- serve, that commerce may have communicated to barbarous tribes in the other hemisphere, the numerals used by more