Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 1.djvu/731

Rh AMERICAN INDIANS.] AMERICA 689 verb is said to amount to five or six thousand ; in other words, the number of possible variations is indefinite.&quot; The formidable array of syllables arises partly from the fact, that there are some sixteen modes of forming the plural of nouns represented in the verb by sixteen corre sponding modifications. Nouns are divided, as in the Dravidian languages of South India, into animate and inanimate. The best account of those peculiarities, as well as the best general distribution of the American languages, are given by Professor Whitney of Yale College, in his work on Language and the Study of Language, pp. 34G-351 : &quot; The conditions of the linguistic problem presented by the American languages are exceedingly perplexing, for the same reason as those presented by the Polynesian and African dialects, and in a yet higher degree. The number, variety, and changeableness of the cliil erent tongues is wonderful. Dialectic division is carried to its extreme among them ; the isolating and diversifying tendencies have had full course, with little counteraction from the conserving and assimilating forces. The continent seems ever to have been peopled by a congeries of petty tribes, incessantly at warfare, or standing off from one another in jealous and suspicious seclusion. Certain striking exceptions, it is true, are present to the mind of every one. Mexico, Central America, and Peru, at the time of the Spanish discovery and conquest, were the seat of empires possessing an organised system of government, with national creeds and insti tutions, with modes of writing and styles of architecture, and other appliances of a considerably developed culture, of indigenous origin. Such relics, too, as the great mounds which are scattered so widely through our western country, and the ancient workings upon the veins and ledges of native copper along the southern shore of Lake Superior, show that other large portions of the northern continent hail not always been in the same savage condition as that in which our ancestors found them. Yet these were exceptions only, not changing the general rule ; and there is reason to believe that, as the civilisation of the Mississippi valley had been extinguished by the incursion and conquest of more barbarous tribes, so a similar fa .c was threatening that of the southern peoples : that, in fact, American culture was on its way to destruction even without European inter ference, as European culture for a time had seemed to be during the Dark Ages which attended the downfall of the Roman empire. If the differentiation of American language had been thus un checked by the influence of culture, it has been also favoured by the influence of the variety of climate and mode of life. While the other great families occupy, for the most part, one region or one zone, the American tribes have been exposed to all the difference of circumstances which can find place between the Arctic and the Antarctic oceans, amid ice-fields, mountains, valleys, on dry table lands, and in reeking river-basins, along shores of every clime. Moreover, these languages have shown themselves to possess a peculiar mobility and changeableness of material. There are groups of kindred tribes whose separation is known to be of not very long standing, but in whose speech the correspondences are almost over whelmed and hidden from sight by the discordances which have .sprung up. In more than one tongue it has been remarked that books of instruction prepared by missionaries have become anti quated and almost unintelligible in three or four generations. Add to all this, that our knowledge of the family begins in the most recent period, less than four hundred years ago; that, though it has been since penetrated and pressed on every side by cultivated nations, the efforts made to collect and preserve information respect ing it have been only spasmodic and fragmentary; that it is almost wholly destitute of literature, and even of traditions of any authority and value ; and that great numbers of its constituent members have perished, in the wasting away of the tribes by mutual warfare, by pestilence and famine, and by the encroach ments of more powerful races and it will be clearly seen that the comprehensive comparative study of American languages is beset with very great difficulties. &quot; Yet it is the confident opinion of linguistic scholars that a fun damental unity lies at the base of all these infinitely varying forms of speech ; that they may be, and probably are, all descended from a single parent language. For, whatever their differences of material, there is a single type or plan upon which their forms are developed and their constructions made, from the Arctic Ocean to Cape Horn, and one sufficiently peculiar and distinctive to con stitute a genuine indication of relationship. This type is called the incorporativc or polysynthetic. It tends to the excessive and ^normal agglomeration of distinct significant elements in its words; whereby, on the one hand, cumbrous compounds are formed as the names of objects, and a character of tedious and time-wasting poly- s} llabism is given to the language see, for example, the three to ten-syllabled numeral and pronominal words of our western Indian tongues; or the Mexican name for goat, kwa-kwauh teutsone, literally head- tree (horn) -lip -hair (beard), or the horned and bearded one and, on the other hand, and what is of yet more importance, an unwieldy aggregation, verbal or quasi-verbal, is substituted for the phrase or sentence, with its distinct and balanced members. Thus, the Mexican says, I-flesh-eat, as a single word, compounded of three elements ; or if, for emphasis, the object is left to stand separate, it is at least first represented by a pronoun in the verbal compound ; as, I-it-eat, the flesh ; or, I-it-him-gives ttic bread, my son, for I give my son the bread. &quot;The incorporative type is not wholly peculiar to the languages of our continent. A trace of it (in the. insertion, among the verbal forms, of an objective as well as a subjective pronominal ending) is found even in one of the Ugrian dialects of the Scythian family, the Hungarian ; and the Basque, of which we shall presently speak more particularly, exhibits it in a very notable measure. It is found, too, in considerably varying degree and style of development in the different branches of the American family. But its general effect is still such that the linguist is able to claim that the lan guages to which it belongs are, in virtue of their structure, akin with one another, and distinguished from all other known tongues. &quot;Not only do the subjective and objective pronouns thus enter into the substance of the verb, but also a great variety of modifiers of the verbal action, adverbs, in the form of particles and frag ments of words ; thus, almost everything which helps to make ex pression forms a part of verbal conjugation, and the verbal paradigm becomes well-nigh interminable. An extreme instance of excessive synthesis is afforded in the Cherokee word-phrase wi-ni-taiv-li-gc-gi- na-li-skaw-lung-ta-naio-nc-li-ti-sc-sti, they will by that time have nearly finished granting [favours] from a distance to thee and me. Other common traits, which help to strengthen our conclusion that these languages are ultimately related, are not wanting. Such are, for example, the habit of combining words by fragments, by one or two representative syllables ; the direct conversion of nouns, substantive and adjective, into verbs, and their conjugation as such ; peculiarities of generic distinction many languages dividing animate from inanimate beings (somewhat as we do by the use of who and u-liat}, with arbitrary and fanciful details of classification, like those exhibited by the Indo-European languages in their separation of masculine and feminine ; the possession of a very peculiar scheme for denoting the degrees of family relationship ; and so on. &quot;As regards their material constitution, their assignment of cer tain sounds to represent certain ideas, our Indian dialects show, as already remarked, a very great discordance. It has been claimed that there are not less than a hundred languages or groups upon the continent, between whose words are discoverable no correspondences which might not be sufficiently explained as the result of accident. Doubtless a more thorough and sharpsighted investigation, a more penetrating linguistic analysis and comparison though, under exist ing circumstances, any even distant approximation to the actual beginning may be hopeless would considerably reduce this number ; yet there might still remain as many unconnected groups as are to be found in all Europe and Asia. It is needless to undertake here an enumeration of the divisions of Indian speech : we will but notice a few of the most important groups occupying our own portion of the continent. &quot; In the extreme north, along the whole shore of tlie Arctic Ocean, are the Eskimo dialects, with which is nearly allied the Greenlandish. Below them is spread out, on the west, the great Athapaskan group. On the east, and as far south as the line of Tennessee and North Carolina, stretches the immense region occupied by the numerous dialects of the Algonquin or Delaware stock ; within it, however, is enclosed the distinct branch of Iroquois languages. Our south eastern states were in possession of the Florida group, comprising the Creek, Choctaw, and Cherokee. The great nation of the Sioux or Dakotas gives its name to the branch which occupied the Mis souri valley and parts of the lower Mississippi. Another wide spread sub-family, including the Shoshonce and Comanche, ranged from the shores of Texas north-westward to the borders of California and the territory of the Athapaskas; and the Pacific coast was occupied by a medley of tribes. Mexico and Central America, finally, were the home of a great variety of tongues, that of the cultivated Aztecs, with its kindred, having the widest range.&quot; For further information regarding the aboriginal lan guages of America, the reader is referred to the researches of Balbi, Gallatin, Vater, and Schoolcraft; to Lewis H. Morgan s Tables, with accompanying text and forms, vol. xvii. of the Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge (1871), entitled &quot; Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family,&quot; and to an invaluable work, The Literature of American Aboriginal Languages, by Dr Ludewig, edited by Nicolas Triibner, 1858. Though any attempt to reduce the American popula tion under a few general classes, either on physical or I. - 87