Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 26.djvu/172

160 much weaker when few or no words can be claimed as similar, and the whole burden of proof has to be borne by similar modes of word-formation and syntax, as, for example, in the researches of Aymonier and Keane tending to trace the Malay group of languages into connection with the Khmer or Cambodian. Within America the philologist uses with success the strong method of combined dictionary and grammar in order to define his great language-groups, such as the Algonquin extending from Hudson's Bay to Virginia, the Athapascan from Hudson's Bay to New Mexico, both crossing Canada in their vast range. But attempts to trace analogies between lists of words in Asiatic and American languages, though they may have shown some similarities deserving further inquiry, have hardly proved an amount of correspondence beyond what chance coincidence would be capable of producing. Thus, when it comes to judging of affinities between the great American language-families, or of any of them with the Asiatic, there is only the weaker method of structure to fall back on. Here the Esquimau analogy seems to be with North Asiatic languages. It would be defined as agglutinative-suffixing, or, to put the definition practically, an Esquimau word of however portentous length is treated by looking out in the dictionary the first syllable or two, which will be the root, the rest being a string of modifying suffixes. The Esquimau thus presents in an exaggerated form the characteristic structure of the vast Ural-Altaic or Turanian group of Asiatic languages. In studying American languages as a whole, the first step is to discard the generalization of Duponceau as to the American languages from Greenland to Cape Horn being united together, and distinguished from those of other parts of the world, by a common character of polysynthetism, or combining whole sentences into words. The real divergences of structure in American language-families are brought clearly into view in the two dissertations of M. Lucien Adam, which are the most valuable papers of the Congrès International des Americanistes. Making special examination of sixteen languages of North and South America, Adam considers these to belong to a number of independent or irreducible families, as they would have been, he says, "had there been primitively several human couples."

It may be worth suggesting, however, that the task of the philologer is to exhaust every possibility of discovering connections between languages before falling back on the extreme hypothesis of independent origins. These American language-families have grammatical tendencies in common, which suggest original relationship, and in some of these even correspond with languages of other regions in a way which may indicate connection rather than chance. For instance, the distinction of gender, not by sex as male and female, but by life as animate and inanimate, is familiar in the Algonquin group; in Cree muskesin = shoe (moccasin) makes its plural muskesinặ, while eskwayū = woman (squaw) makes its plural eskwaywuk. Now, this kind of