Page:Archæologia Americana—volume 2, 1836.djvu/240

 '-201 A SYNOPSIS OF THE INDIAN TRIBES. [iNTROD. The modern languages of Western Europe were formed at a time when writing had long been in general use: and it is diffi- cult, it' not impossible, to discriminate between what might be considered as the natural progress of language, and the effect produced by the mixture of distinct idioms, and by the respec- tive influence of each. It is obviously impossible to have any evidence of the oral languages of antiquity, before they had been reduced to writing. We cannot ascend higher than the most ancient works which have been preserved. We cannot assert positively, that the Pentateuch and the Iliad were the first books ever written in Hebrew and in Greek. But there is the highest degree of probability that both of them were composed and written at an epoch so near the time when writing had been first introduced amongst the Jews and the Greeks respectively, that that invention could, as yet, have produced but little effect on the language of either. We may therefore justly consider those two works, as the nearest possi- ble approximation to the oral language of those two people prior to the discovery of the alphabet. If we find in them the same grammatical forms, and substantially the same structure of language, as in the following ages of Hebraic and Greek litera- ture, it affords a strong presumption, that those forms and all that essentially constitutes the character of a language had their origin prior to the invention of writing, and in a very early stage of society. Those two languages belong to two distinct and dissimilar families. In one of them we find a system of compounded words and of inflections, much less extensive than that of the American nations, but, I suspect, much more perfect, and as superior, as the Greeks even of the Homeric times, were to our Indians. In the Hebrew, we discover, besides several other correspondences,* transitions, or the combination in a single word of the two pronouns with the verb. Thus, although the application of the principles differs widely in the several lan- guages, still the modes adopted were originally of a similar character. This may be adduced as an additional proof of the common origin of mankind. It proves, at all events, that the prove the more ancient origin of the Iberians, or, to speak more cor- rectly, that they had separated from the common stock and migrated westwardly at an earlier date. resort to the participle for designating the present time with precision.
 * The use, for instance, of the present tense for the preterite, and the