Page:Essays ethnological and linguistic.djvu/113

Rh and that of the rest of the world. Many of the old suppositions, in fact, arose only from an imperfect knowledge of the languages, and were adopted from a few isolated cases to maintain an imaginative generality. The more carefully we undertake to examine the common general treatises on the grammar of the various American nations, the more certainly we shall find them as distinctly marked in groups as are the languages of the other continents, and having clearly traceable connections with the languages of the other continents, so as to have no more a peculiar identity of structure with one another, than the respective groups may evidence of Asiatic or other foreign origin.

These views are now fully admitted by the later writers of America, as Van Amringe, in his "Natural History of Man," and Professor Rafinesque, of Philadelphia, who seems to have studied more than any other the native languages. The former, while referring to Du Ponceau's edition of the "Leni Lenape Grammar," says — "The whole grammatical arrangement of language, from vowels and consonants to prosody, is arranged in the savage tones of these unlettered barbarians substantially upon the same principles as in the elaborately polished languages of Europe" (p. 532). The latter, Professor Rafinesque, says — "The theory about the common exclusive grammatical structure of all the American nations is erroneous, and based upon partial facts. (See "American Nations," Philadelphia, 1836, p. 65.) Since the time of Du Ponceau a more discriminating class of philologists has arisen in the United States, among whom we have to name Professor W. W. Turner, whose labours for the Smithsonian Institute demand our respectful attention, and Dr. Francis Hawks, the learned translator of Rivero's "Peruvian Antiquities." These writers state, directly in opposition to the fanciful theories of their predecessors, that "our materials respecting the Indian languages are as yet too scanty to justify sweeping general assertions, and that it is not true that they are all characterized by what Du Ponceau called Polysyntheticism, though it doubtless exists in many instances." (Hawks' "Rivero," New York, 1853, p. 119.) In the same work it is also stated by Rivero himself, a native of Peru, who had made the antiquities of his country his peculiar study, that "the American languages are susceptible of geographical division, some being soft, with principally vowel terminations, and others harsh, with terminal consonants" (p. 114). In conformity with these distinctions, accordingly, we further find some writers discovering decided analogies between various American lan-