Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 78.djvu/521

Rh much simpler, and whose knowledge more confined, should be content with an exceedingly small vocabulary.

It is, however, certain that the figures just cited are very erroneous. If any one who considers himself an average person will sit down and make a list or rough estimate of his speaking vocabulary, he will find it to be far above a thousand. It may safely be said that the so-called "average man" knows, and on occasion uses, the names of at least a thousand different things; in other words, that his vocabulary possesses more than a thousand nouns alone. To these must be added the verbs, of which every one employs at least several hundred; adjectives; pronouns; and the other parts of speech, the short and familiar words that are absolutely indispensable to all communication in any language. It may be safely estimated that it is an exceptionally ignorant and stupid person in any civilized country that has not at his command a vocabulary of at least two thousand words, and probably the figure in the normal case is a great deal higher.

When any one has professed to declare on the strength of his observation that a particular Indian language consists of only a few hundred terms, he has displayed chiefly his ignorance. He has either not taken the trouble to exhaust the vocabulary, or has not known how to do so. It is true that the traveler or settler can usually converse with natives to the satisfaction of his own needs with a knowledge of only two or three hundred words. Even the missionary can do a great deal with this stock if it is properly chosen. But of course it does not follow that because the white man in most cases has not learned more of a language, that there is no more. On this point the testimony of the philologist or student, who has made it his business to learn all the language as nearly as may be, is the only evidence that can be considered.

If now we review the Indian languages that have been most thoroughly explored, so to speak, and of which dictionaries are in existence that are even tolerably representative, as of Aztec, Maya, Algonkin, Eskimo, Sioux and several other idioms, it is found that all of these contain 5,000 words, and some considerably exceed this number. What is more, we discover that professions of an incomplete knowledge of a language usually come from the very men who have compiled these dictionaries or who have given years to the study of a language. It is the old story that it is only by increased information that one obtains a perception of one's ignorance. The words are there in the Indian languages; it is only when we have learned several thousand that we begin to realize how many there must still be which are unrecorded. It may safely be said that every American Indian language, whether or not it has yet been studied, possessed before coming in contact with white civilization a vocabulary of at least 5,000 different native words.