Page:Archæologia Americana—volume 2, 1836.djvu/238

 H)2 A SYNOPSIS OF THE INDIAN TRIBES. [iNTROD. the Mithridates wonder " bow such people can have performed such philological work, which can only have been the result of profound and abstract meditations." And it is remarkable that this assertion is in part founded on the multiplied inflections of the transitions of the verb. " What is most extraordinary is the prodigious number of forms expressing the accusative case of pronouns governed by the verb."* May not our early impressions have associated in our minds a general, though vague notion of inflected languages, with an advanced state of civilization ? The admiration felt for the great writers of Rome and Greece, the real superiority in many respects of their languages over those of Modern Europe, the origin of these in the invasions of barbarous nations and in the ages of darkness which followed, have given us the habit of associating inflected languages with knowledge and civilization, and those destitute of those forms with barbarism and ignorance. Yet the undeniable merits of the classical languages will be found, on reflection, to consist in their perfection, in the manner in which the principle has been applied, rather than the princi- ple itself. It is not certainly in the multiplied inflections used in the transi- tions of some of the Indian languages that we find proofs of pro- found meditations. All those inflections, however varied, never contain, independent of the root of the verb, any other ideas, but those of two pronouns, respectively agent and object of the action. In whatever manner the ideas contained in c J love thee, 9 ' you love me/ may be expressed, the accessaries embraced by the word or words are never any thing more or less than 1 1 thee,' ( you me,' &tc. The fact that, although the object in view was, in every known Indian language without exception, to concentrate in a single word those pronouns with the verb, yet the means used for that purpose are not the same in any two of them, shows that none of them was the result of philo- sophical researches and preconcerted design. And, in those which abound most in inflections of that description, nothing more has been done, in that respect, than to effect, by a most complex process and with a cumbersome and unnecessary machinery, that which, in almost every other language, has been as well if not better performed through the most simple means. Those transitions, in their complexness and in the still
 * Mithridates. — Esquimaux.