Page:Notes on the State of Virginia (1853).djvu/125

Rh of the affinity of nations which ever can be referred to. How many ages have elapsed since the English, the Dutch, the Germans, the Swiss, the Norwegians, Danes and Swedes have separated from their common stock? Yet how many more must elapse before the proofs of their common origin, which exist in their several languages, will disappear? It is to be lamented then, very much to be lamented, that we have suffered so many of the Indian tribes already to extinguish, without our having previously collected and deposited in the records of literature the general rudiments at least of the languages they spoke. Were vocabularies formed of all the languages spoken in North and South America, preserving their appellations of the most common objects in Nature, of those which must be present to every nation, barbarous or civilized, with the inflections of their nouns and verbs, their principles of regimen and concord, and these deposited in all the public libraries, it would furnish opportunities to those skilled in the languages of the old world to compare them with these, now, or at any future time, and hence to construct the best evidence of the derivation of this part of the human race. It will be seen that in several of these vocabularies there is a remarkable resemblance in the numbers when there is not a trace of it in the other parts of the languages. When a tribe has gone farther than its neighbors in inventing a system of numeration, the obvious utility of this will occasion it to be immediately adopted by the surrounding tribes with only such modifications of the sounds as may accommodate them to the habitual pronunciations of their own language.

But imperfect as is our knowledge of the tongues spoken in America, it suffices to discover the following remarkable fact. Arranging them under the radical ones to which they may be palpably traced, and doing the same by those of the red men of Asia, there will be found probably twenty in America for one in Asia of those radical languages so called, because, if they were ever the same, they have lost all resemblance to one another. A separation into dialects may be the