INTRODUCTORY.

The processes, psychical and logical, which lie at the basis and modify the forms of articulate speech, have yet to be defined and classified in a manner to secure the general acceptance of scholars. While these processes are operative and recognizable in all languages, it has ever seemed to me that they are more apparent and transparent in the unwritten tongues of savage tribes. As the stream is more diaphanous near its source, as the problem of organic life is more readily studied in the lowest groups of animals and vegetables, by such analogies we are prompted to select the uncultured speech of the rudest of our race to discover the laws of growth in human expression.

Though such laws are not precisely the same throughout space and time, they unquestionably partake of the same uniformity as we note in other natural phenomena, and no language has yet been reported which stands alone in its formation.

Perhaps the general laws under which languages should be grouped have already been defined as closely as the subject permits. The labors of Wilhelm von Humboldt, as expanded by Professor Steinthal, would appear to present the most comprehensive and satisfactory classification yet attempted. Such is the conclusion to which my own studies of the subject have led me, and in the first three essays of this Part, I have set forth in considerable detail the application of this opinion to the languages of America. Especially in the second essay, I have attempted to popularize a profounder philosophic analysis of these tongues than has heretofore appeared in works on the subject.

The essay on “The Earliest Form of Human Speech” offers a series of inferences drawn from the study of American tongues as to the general characteristics of the articulate utterances of the species when it first became possessed—by some slow evolutionary process—of the power of conveying ideas by intelligible sounds. It is an application of facts drawn from a limited number of languages to the linguistic status of the whole species at an indeterminately remote period, but is, I think, a fair use of the materials offered.

The analysis of words for the affections is the theme of the essay on “The Conception of Love in some American Languages.” It is an example of the use to which linguistics may be put in the science of racial psychology; while the essay on the words for linear measures in certain tongues illustrates what knowledge as to the condition of a nation’s arts may be obtained by a scrutiny of its lexicon.

The next essay, on the curious hoax perpetrated on some European and American linguists by the manufacture of a novel American tongue by some French students, is an instance, not wholly unprecedented, of misplaced ingenuity on the one side, and easy credulity on the other. It belongs among the “curiosities of literature.”

Professional linguists will probably consider the most important generalization debated in this Part that of the identity or diversity of the agglutinative and incorporative processes of tongues. These two processes are considered as forms of but one by most of the present French school; but I have maintained their radical distinction, following the German writers above mentioned; and I have further insisted that the incorporative plan is that especially prominent in American languages.

Contents.—Indian geographic names—Language a guide to ethnology—Reveals the growth of arts and the psychologic processes of a people—Illustration from the LenÂpe tongue—Structure of language best studied in savage tongues—Rank of American tongues—Characteristic traits; pronominal forms; idea of personality; polysynthesis; incorporation; holophrasis; origin of these—Lucidity of American tongues; their vocabularies; power of expressing abstract ideas—Conclusion.

I appear before you this evening to enter a plea for one of the most neglected branches of learning, for a study usually considered hopelessly dry and unproductive—that of American aboriginal languages.

It might be thought that such a topic, in America and among Americans, would attract a reasonably large number of students. The interest which attaches to our native soil and to the homes of our ancestors might be supposed to extend to the languages of those nations who for uncounted generations possessed the land which we have occupied relatively so short a time.

This supposition would seem the more reasonable in view of the fact that in one sense these languages have not died out among us. True, they are no longer media of intercourse, but they survive in thousands of geographical names all over our land. In the state of Connecticut alone there are over six hundred, and even more in Pennsylvania.

Certainly it would be a most legitimate anxiety which should direct itself to the preservation of the correct forms and precise meanings of these numerous and peculiarly national designations. One would think that this alone would not fail to excite something more than a languid curiosity in American linguistics, at least in our institutions of learning and societies for historical research.

That this subject has received so slight attention I attribute to the comparatively recent understanding of the value of the study of languages in general, and more particularly to the fact that no one, so far as I know, has set forth the purposes for which we should investigate these tongues, and the results which we expect to reach by means of them. This it is my present purpose to attempt, so far as it can be accomplished in the scope of an evening address.

The time has not long passed when the only good reasons for studying a language were held to be either that we might thereby acquaint ourselves with its literature; or that certain business, trading, or political interests might be subserved; or that the nation speaking it might be made acquainted with the blessings of civilization and Christianity. These were all good and sufficient reasons, but I cannot adduce any one of them in support of my plea to-night: for the languages I shall speak of have no literature; all transactions with their people can be carried on as well or better in European tongues; and, in fact, many of these peoples are no longer in existence—they have died out or amalgamated with others. What I have to argue for is the study of the dead languages of extinct and barbarous tribes.

You will readily see that my arguments must be drawn from other considerations than those of immediate utility. I must seek them in the broader fields of ethnology and philosophy; I must appeal to your interest in man as a race, as a member of a common species, as possessing in all his families and tribes the same mind, the same soul. Language is almost our only clue to discover the kinship of those countless scattered hordes who roamed the forests of this broad continent. Their traditions are vague or lost, written records they had none, their customs and arts are misleading, their religions misunderstood; their languages alone remain to testify to a oneness of blood often seemingly repudiated by an internecine hostility.

I am well aware of the limits which a wise caution assigns to the employment of linguistics in ethnology, and I am only too familiar with the many foolish, unscientific attempts to employ it with reference to the American race. But in spite of all this, I repeat that it is the surest and almost our only means to trace the ancient connection and migrations of nations in America.

Through its aid alone we have reached a positive knowledge that most of the area of South America, including the whole of the West Indies, was occupied by three great families of nations, not one of which had formed any important settlement on the northern continent. By similar evidence we know that the tribe which greeted Penn, when he landed on the site of this city where I now speak, was a member of the one vast family—the great Algonkin stock—whose various clans extended from the palmetto swamps of Carolina to the snow-clad hills of Labrador, and from the easternmost cape of Newfoundland to the peaks of the Rocky Mountains, over 20° of latitude and 50° of longitude. We also know that the general trend of migration in the northern continent has been from north to south, and that this is true not only of the more savage tribes, as the Algonkins, Iroquois, and Athapascas, but also of those who, in the favored southern lands, approached a form of civilization, the Aztecs, the Mayas, and the Quiches. These and many minor ethnologic facts have already been obtained by the study of American languages.

But such external information is only a small part of what they are capable of disclosing. We can turn them, like the reflector of a microscope, on the secret and hidden mysteries of the aboriginal man, and discover his inmost motives, his impulses, his concealed hopes and fears, those that gave rise to his customs and laws, his schemes of social life, his superstitions and his religions.

Personal names, family names, titles, forms of salutation, methods of address, terms of endearment, respect, and reproach, words expressing the emotions, these are what infallibly reveal the daily social family life of a community, and the way in which its members regard one another. They are precisely as correct when applied to the investigation of the American race as elsewhere, and they are the more valuable just there, because his deep-seated distrust of the white invaders—for which, let us acknowledge, he had abundant cause—led the Indian to practice concealment and equivocation on these personal topics.

In no other way can the history of the development of his arts be reached. You are doubtless aware that diligent students of the Aryan languages have succeeded in faithfully depicting the arts and habits of that ancient community in which the common ancestors of Greek and Roman, Persian and Dane, Brahmin and Irishman, dwelt together as of one blood and one speech. This has been done by ascertaining what household words are common to all these tongues, and therefore must have been in use among the primeval horde from which they are all descended. The method is conclusive, and yields positive results. There is no reason why it should not be addressed to American languages, and we may be sure that it would be most fruitful. How valuable it would be to take even a few words, as maize, tobacco, pipe, bow, arrow, and the like, each representing a widespread art or custom, and trace their derivations and affinities through the languages of the whole continent! We may be sure that striking and unexpected results would be obtained.

These languages also offer an entertaining field to the psychologist.

On account of their transparency, as I may call it, the clearness with which they retain the primitive forms of their radicals, they allow us to trace out the growth of words, and thus reveal the operations of the native mind by a series of witnesses whose testimony cannot be questioned. Often curious associations of ideas are thus disclosed, very instructive to the student of mankind. Many illustrations of this could be given, but I do not wish to assail your ears by a host of unknown sounds, so I shall content myself with one, and that taken from the language of the LenapÉ, or Delaware Indians.

I shall endeavor to trace out one single radical in that language, and show you how many, and how strangely diverse ideas were built up upon it.

The radical which I select is the personal pronoun of the first person, I, Latin Ego. In Delaware this is a single syllable, a slight nasal, Ne, or Ni.

Let me premise by informing you that this is both a personal and a possessive pronoun; it means both I and mine. It is both singular and plural, both I and we, mine and our.

The changes of the application of this root are made by adding suffixes to it.

I begin with ni'hillan, literally, “mine, it is so,” or “she, it, is truly mine,” the accent being on the first syllable, ni', mine. But the common meaning of this verb in Delaware is more significant of ownership than this tame expression. It is an active, animate verb, and means, “I beat, or strike, somebody.” To the rude minds of the framers of that tongue, ownership meant the right to beat what one owned.

We might hope this sense was confined to the lower animals; but not so. Change the accent from the first to the second syllable, ni'hillan, to nihil'lan, and you have the animate active verb with an intensive force, which signifies “to beat to death,” “to kill some person;” and from this, by another suffix, you have nihil'lowen, to murder, and nihil'lowet, murderer. The bad sense of the root is here pushed to its uttermost.

But the root also developed in a nobler direction. Add to ni'hillan the termination ape, which means a male, and you have nihillape, literally, “I, it is true, a man,” which, as an adjective, means free, independent, one’s own master, “I am my own man.” From this are derived the noun, nihillapewit, a freeman; the verb nihillapewin, to be free; and the abstract, nihillasowagan, freedom, liberty, independence. These are glorious words; but I can go even farther. From this same theme is derived the verb nihillape-wheu, to set free, to liberate, to redeem; and from this the missionaries framed the word nihillape-whoalid, the Redeemer, the Saviour.

Here is an unexpected antithesis, the words for a murderer and the Saviour both from one root! It illustrates how strange is the concatenation of human thoughts.

These are by no means all the derivatives from the root ni, I.

When reduplicated as nene, it has a plural and strengthened form, like “our own.” With a pardonable and well-nigh universal weakness, which we share with them, the nation who spoke the language believed themselves the first created of mortals and the most favored by the Creator. Hence whatever they designated as “ours” was both older and better than others of its kind. Hence nenni came to mean ancient, primordial, indigenous, and as such it is a frequent prefix in the Delaware language. Again, as they considered themselves the first and only true men, others being barbarians, enemies, or strangers, nenno was understood to be one of us, a man like ourselves, of our nation.

In their different dialects the sounds of n, l, and r were alternated, so that while Thomas Campanius, who translated the Catechism into Delaware about 1645, wrote that word rhennus, later writers have given it lenno, and translate it “man.” This is the word which we find in the name Lenni Lenape, which, by its derivation, means “we, we men.” The antecedent lenni is superfluous. The proper name of the Delaware nation was and still is Len ÂpÉ, “we men,” or “our men,” and those critics who have maintained that this was a misnomer, introduced by Mr. Heckewelder, have been mistaken in their facts.^[264]

I have not done with the root ne. I might go on and show you how it is at the base of the demonstrative pronouns, this, that, those, in Delaware; how it is the radical of the words for thinking, reflecting, and meditating; how it also gives rise to words expressing similarity and identity; how it means to be foremost, to stand ahead of others; and finally, how it signifies to come to me, to unify or congregate together. But doubtless I have trespassed on your ears long enough with unfamiliar words.

Such suggestions as these will give you some idea of the value of American languages to American ethnology. But I should be doing injustice to my subject were I to confine my arguments in favor of their study to this horizon. If they are essential to a comprehension of the red race, not less so are they to the science of linguistics in general. This science deals not with languages, but with language. It looks at the idiom of a nation, not as a dry catalogue of words and grammatical rules, but as the living expression of the thinking power of man, as the highest manifestation of that spiritual energy which has lifted him from the level of the brute, the complete definition of which, in its origin and evolution, is the loftiest aim of universal history. As the intention of all speech is the expression of thought, and as the final purpose of all thinking is the discovery of truth, so the ideal of language, the point toward which it strives, is the absolute form for the realization of intellectual function.

In this high quest no tongue can be overlooked, none can be left out of account. One is just as important as another. Goethe once said that he who knows but one language knows none; we may extend the apothegm, and say that so long as there is a single language on the globe not understood and analyzed, the science of language will be incomplete and illusory. It has often proved the case that the investigation of a single, narrow, obscure dialect has changed the most important theories of history. What has done more than anything else to overthrow, or, at least, seriously to shake, the time-honored notion that the White Race first came from Central Asia? It was the study of the Lithuanian dialect on the Baltic Sea, a language of peasants, without literature or culture, but which displays forms more archaic than the Sanscrit. What has led to a complete change of views as to the prehistoric population of Southern Europe? The study of the Basque, a language unknown out of a few secluded valleys in the Pyrenees.

There are many reasons why unwritten languages, like those of America, are more interesting, more promising in results, to the student of linguistics, than those which for generations have been cast in the conventional moulds of written speech.

Their structure is more direct, simple, transparent; they reveal more clearly the laws of the linguistic powers in their daily exercise; they are less tied down to hereditary formulÆ and meaningless repetitions.

Would we explain the complicated structure of highly-organized tongues like our own, would we learn the laws which have assigned to it its material and formal elements, we must turn to the naÏve speech of savages, there to see in their nakedness those processes which are too obscure in our own.

If the much-debated question of the origin of language engages us, we must seek its solution in the simple radicals of savage idioms; and if we wish to institute a comparison between the relative powers of languages, we can by no means omit them from our list. They offer to us the raw material, the essential and indispensable requisites of articulate communication.

As the structure of a language reflects in a measure, and as, on the other hand, it in a measure controls and directs the mental workings of those who speak it, the student of psychology must occupy himself with the speech of the most illiterate races in order to understand their theory of things, their notions of what is about them. They teach him the undisturbed evolution of the untrained mind.

As the biologist in pursuit of that marvellous something which we call “the vital principle” turns from the complex organisms of the higher animals and plants to life in its simplest expression in microbes and single cells, so in the future will the linguist find that he is nearest the solution of the most weighty problems of his science when he directs his attention to the least cultivated languages.

Convinced as I am of the correctness of this analogy, I venture to predict that in the future the analysis of the American languages will be regarded as one of the most important fields in linguistic study, and will modify most materially the findings of that science. And I make this prediction the more confidently, as I am supported in it by the great authority of Wilhelm von Humboldt, who for twenty years devoted himself to their investigation.

As I am advocating so warmly that more attention should be devoted to these languages, it is but fair that you should require me to say something descriptive about them, to explain some of their peculiarities of structure. To do this properly I should require not the fag end of one lecture, but a whole course of lectures. Yet perhaps I can say enough now to show you how much there is in them worth studying.

Before I turn to this, however, I should like to combat a prejudice which I fear you may entertain. It is that same ancient prejudice which led the old Greeks to call all those who did not speak their sonorous idioms barbarians; for that word meant nothing more nor less than babblers (a?a???), people who spoke an unintelligible tongue. Modern civilized nations hold that prejudice yet, in the sense that each insists that his own language is the best one extant, the highest in the scale, and that wherein others differ from it in structure they are inferior.

So unfortunately placed is this prejudice with reference to my subject, that in the very volume issued by our government at Washington to encourage the study of the Indian languages, there is a long essay to prove that English is the noblest, most perfect language in the world, while all the native languages are, in comparison, of a very low grade indeed!^[265]

The essayist draws his arguments chiefly from the absence of inflections in English. Yet many of the profoundest linguists of this century have maintained that a fully inflected language, like the Greek or Latin, is for that very reason ahead of all others. We may suspect that when a writer lauds his native tongue at the expense of others, he is influenced by a prejudice in its favor and an absence of facility in the others.

Those best acquainted with American tongues praise them most highly for flexibility, accuracy, and resources of expression. They place some of them above any Aryan language. But what is this to those who do not know them? To him who cannot bend the bow of Ulysses it naturally seems a useless and awkward weapon.

I do not ask you to accept this opinion either; but I do ask that you rid your minds of bias, and that you do not condemn a tongue because it differs widely from that which you speak.

American tongues do, indeed, differ very widely from those familiar to Aryan ears. Not that they are all alike in structure. That was a hasty generalization, dating from a time when they were less known. Yet the great majority of them have certain characteristics in common, sufficient to place them in a linguistic class by themselves. I shall name and explain some of these.

As of the first importance I would mention the prominence they assign to pronouns and pronominal forms. Indeed, an eminent linguist has been so impressed with this feature that he has proposed to classify them distinctively as “pronominal languages.” They have many classes of pronouns, sometimes as many as eighteen, which is more than twice as many as the Greek. There is often no distinction between a noun and a verb other than the pronoun which governs it. That is, if a word is employed with one form of the pronoun it becomes a noun, if with another pronoun, it becomes a verb.

We have something of the same kind in English. In the phrase, “I love,” love is a verb; but in “my love,” it is a noun. It is noteworthy that this treatment of words as either nouns or verbs, as we please to employ them, was carried further by Shakespeare than by any other English writer. He seemed to divine in such a trait of language vast resources for varied and pointed expression. If I may venture a suggestion as to how it does confer peculiar strength to expressions, it is that it brings into especial prominence the idea of Personality; it directs all subjects of discourse by the notion of an individual, a living, personal unit. This imparts vividness to narratives, and directness and life to propositions.

Of these pronouns, that of the first person is usually the most developed. From it, in many dialects, are derived the demonstratives and relatives, which in Aryan languages were taken from the third person. This prominence of the Ego, this confidence in self, is a trait of the race as well as of their speech. It forms part of that savage independence of character which prevented them coalescing into great nations, and led them to prefer death to servitude.

Another characteristic, which at one time was supposed to be universal on this continent, is what Mr. Peter Du Ponceau named polysynthesis. He meant by this a power of running several words into one, dropping parts of them and retaining only the significant syllables. Long descriptive names of all objects of civilized life new to the Indians were thus coined with the greatest ease. Some of these are curious enough. The Pavant Indians call a school house by one word, which means “a stopping-place where sorcery is practiced;” their notion of book-learning being that it belongs to the uncanny arts. The Delaware word for horse means “the four-footed animal which carries on his back.”

This method of coining words is, however, by no means universal in American languages. It prevails in most of those in British America and the United States, in Aztec and various South American idioms; but in others, as the dialects found in Yucatan and Guatemala, and in the Tupi of Brazil, the Otomi of Mexico, and the Klamath of the Pacific coast, it is scarcely or not at all present.

Another trait, however, which was confounded with this by Mr. Du Ponceau, but really belongs in a different category of grammatical structure, is truly distinctive of the languages of the continent, and I am not sure that any one of them has been shown to be wholly devoid of it. This is what is called incorporation. It includes in the verb, or in the verbal expression, the object and manner of the action.

This is effected by making the subject of the verb an inseparable prefix, and by inserting between it and the verb itself, or sometimes directly in the latter, between its syllables, the object, direct or remote, and the particles indicating mode. The time or tense particles, on the other hand, will be placed at one end of this compound, either as prefixes or suffixes, thus placing the whole expression strictly within the limits of a verbal form of speech.

Both the above characteristics, I mean Polysynthesis and Incorporation, are unconscious efforts to carry out a certain theory of speech which has aptly enough been termed holophrasis, or the putting the whole of a phrase into a single word. This is the aim of each of them, though each endeavors to accomplish it by different means. Incorporation confines itself exclusively to verbal forms, while polysynthesis embraces both nouns and verbs.

Suppose we carry the analysis further, and see if we can obtain an answer to the query,—Why did this effort at blending forms of speech obtain so widely? Such an inquiry will indicate how valuable to linguistic search would prove the study of this group of languages.

I think there is no doubt but that it points unmistakably to that very ancient, to that primordial period of human utterance when men had not yet learned to connect words into sentences, when their utmost efforts at articulate speech did not go beyond single words, which, aided by gestures and signs, served to convey their limited intellectual converse. Such single vocables did not belong to any particular part of speech. There was no grammar to that antique tongue. Its disconnected exclamations mean whole sentences in themselves.

A large part of the human race, notably, but not exclusively, the aborigines of this continent, continued the tradition of this mode of expression in the structure of their tongues, long after the union of thought and sound in audible speech had been brought to a high degree of perfection.

Although I thus regard one of the most prominent peculiarities of American languages as a survival from an exceedingly low stage of human development, it by no means follows that this is an evidence of their inferiority.

The Chinese, who made no effort to combine the primitive vocables into one, but range them nakedly side by side, succeeded no better than the American Indians; and there is not much beyond assertion to prove that the Aryans, who, through their inflections, marked the relation of each word in the sentence by numerous tags of case, gender, number, etc., got any nearer the ideal perfection of language.

If we apply what is certainly a very fair test, to wit: the uses to which a language is and can be put, I cannot see that a well-developed American tongue, such as the Aztec or the Algonkin, in any way falls short of, say French or English.

It is true that in many of these tongues there is no distinction made between expressions, which with us are carefully separated, and are so in thought. Thus, in the Tupi of Brazil and elsewhere, there is but one word for the three expressions, “his father,” “he is a father,” and “he has a father;” in many, the simple form of the verb may convey three different ideas, as in Ute, where the word for “he seizes” means also “the seizer,” and as a descriptive noun, “a bear,” the animal which seizes.

This has been charged against these languages as a lack of “differentiation.” Grammatically, this is so; but the same charge applies with almost equal force to the English language, where the same word may belong to any of four, five, even six parts of speech, dependent entirely on the connection in which it is used.

As a set-off, the American languages avoid confusions of expression which prevail in European tongues.

Thus in none of these latter, when I say “the love of God,” “l’amour de Dieu,” “amor Dei,” can you understand what I mean. You do not know whether I intend the love which we have or should have toward God, or God’s love toward us. Yet in the Mexican language (and many other American tongues) these two quite opposite ideas are so clearly distinguished that, as Father Carochi warns the readers of his Mexican Grammar, to confound them would not merely be a grievous solecism in speech, but a formidable heresy as well.

Another example. What can you make out of this sentence, which is strictly correct by English grammar: “John told Robert’s son that he must help him?” You can make nothing out of it. It may have any one of six different meanings, depending on the persons referred to by the pronouns “he” and “him.” No such lamentable confusion could occur in any American tongue known to me. The Chippeway, for instance, has three pronouns of the third person, which designate the near and the remote antecedents with the most lucid accuracy.

There is another point that I must mention in this connection, because I find that it has almost always been overlooked or misunderstood by critics of these languages. These have been free in condemning the synthetic forms of construction. But they seem to be ignorant that their use is largely optional. Thus, in Mexican, one can arrange the same sentence in an analytic or a synthetic form, and this is also the case, in a less degree, in the Algonkin. By this means a remarkable richness is added to the language. The higher the grade of synthesis employed, the more striking, elevated, and pointed becomes the expression. In common life long compounds are rare, while in the native Mexican poetry each line is often but one word.

Turning now from the structure of these languages to their vocabularies, I must correct a widespread notion that they are scanty in extent and deficient in the means to express lofty or abstract ideas.

Of course, there are many tracts of thought and learning familiar to us now which were utterly unknown to the American aborigines, and not less so to our own forefathers a few centuries ago. It would be very unfair to compare the dictionary of an Indian language with the last edition of Webster’s Unabridged. But take the English dictionaries of the latter half of the sixteenth century, before Spenser and Shakespeare wrote, and compare them with the Mexican vocabulary of Molina, which contains about 13,000 words, or with the Maya vocabulary of the convent of Motul, which presents over 20,000, both prepared at that date, and your procedure will be just, and you will find it not disadvantageous to the American side of the question.

The deficiency in abstract terms is generally true of these languages. They did not have them, because they had no use for them—and the more blessed was their condition. European languages have been loaded with several thousand such by metaphysics and mysticism, and it has required many generations to discover that they are empty windbags, full of sound and signifying nothing.

Yet it is well known to students that the power of forming abstracts is possessed in a remarkable degree by many native languages. The most recondite formulÆ of dogmatic religion, such as the definition of the Trinity and the difference between consubstantiation and transubstantiation, have been translated into many of them without introducing foreign words, and in entire conformity with their grammatical structure. Indeed, Dr. Augustin de la Rosa, of the University of Guadalajara, says the Mexican is peculiarly adapted to render these metaphysical subtleties.

I have been astonished that some writers should bring up the primary meaning of a word in an American language in order to infer the coarseness of its secondary meaning. This is a strangely unfair proceeding, and could be directed with equal effect against our own tongues. Thus, I read lately a traveler who spoke hardly of an Indian tribe because their word for “to love” was a derivative from that meaning “to buy,” and thence “to prize.” But what did the Latin amare, and the English to love, first mean? Carnally living together is what they first meant, and this is not a nobler derivation than that of the Indian. Even yet, when the most polished of European nations, that one which most exalts la grande passion, does not distinguish in language between loving their wives and liking their dinners, but uses the same word for both emotions, it is scarcely wise for us to indulge in much latitude of inference from such etymologies.

Such is the general character of American languages, and such are the reasons why they should be preserved and studied. The field is vast and demands many laborers to reap all the fruit that it promises. It is believed at present that there are about two hundred wholly independent stocks of languages among the aborigines of this continent. They vary most widely in vocabulary, and seemingly scarcely less so in grammar.

Besides this, each of these stocks is subdivided into dialects, each distinguished by its own series of phonetic changes, and its own new words. What an opportunity is thus offered for the study of the natural evolution of language, unfettered by the petrifying art of writing!

This is the case which I present to you, and for which I earnestly solicit your consideration. And that I may add weight to my appeal, I close by quoting the words of one of America’s most distinguished scientists, Professor William Dwight Whitney, of Yale College, who writes to this effect:

“The study of American languages is the most fruitful and the most important branch of American ArchÆology.”

Contents.—What led Humboldt toward the American tongues—Progress of his studies—Fundamental doctrine of his philosophy of language—His theory of the evolution of languages—Opinion on American languages—His criterion of the relative perfection of languages—Not abundance of forms—Nor verbal richness—American tongues not degenerations—Humboldt’s classification of languages—Psychological origin of Incorporation in language—Its shortcomings—In simple sentences—In compound sentences—Absence of true formal elements—The nature of the American verb.

The foundations of the Philosophy of Language were laid by Wilhelm von Humboldt (born June 22, 1767, died April 8, 1835). The principles he advocated have frequently been misunderstood, and some of them have been modified, or even controverted, by more extended research; but a careful survey of the tendencies of modern thought in this field will show that the philosophic scheme of the nature and growth of languages which he set forth, is gradually reasserting its sway after having been neglected and denied through the preponderance of the so-called “naturalistic” school during the last quarter of a century.

The time seems ripe, therefore, to bring the general principles of his philosophy to the knowledge of American scholars, as applied by himself to the analysis of American languages.

These languages occupied Humboldt’s attention earnestly and for many years. He was first led to their study by his brother Alexander, who presented him with the large linguistic collection amassed during his travels in South and North America.

While Prussian Minister in Rome (1802–8) Wilhelm ransacked the library of the Collegio Romano for rare or unpublished works on American tongues; he obtained from the ex-Jesuit Forneri all the information the latter could give about the Yurari, a tongue spoken on the Meta river, New Granada;^[267] and he secured accurate copies of all the manuscript material on these idioms left by the diligent collector and linguist, the AbbÉ Hervas.

A few years later, in 1812, we find him writing to his friend Baron Alexander von Rennenkampff, then in St. Petersburg: “I have selected the American languages as the special subject of my investigations. They have the closest relationship of any with the tongues of north-eastern Asia; and I beg you therefore to obtain for me all the dictionaries and grammars of the latter which you can.”^[268]

It is probable from this extract that Humboldt was then studying these languages from that limited, ethnographic point of view, from which he wrote his essay on the Basque tongue, the announcement of which appeared, indeed, in that year, 1812, although the work itself was not issued until 1821.

Ten years more of study and reflection taught him a far loftier flight. He came to look upon each language as an organism, all its parts bearing harmonious relations to each other, standing in a definite connection with the intellectual and emotional development of the nation speaking it. Each language again bears the relation to language in general that the species does to the genus, or the genus to the order, and by a comprehensive process of analysis he hoped to arrive at those fundamental laws of articulate speech which form the Philosophy of Language, and which, as they are also the laws of human thought, at a certain point coincide, he believed, with those of the Philosophy of History.

In the completion of this vast scheme, he continued to attach the utmost importance to the American languages.

His illustrations were constantly drawn from them, and they were ever the subject of his earnest studies. He prized them as in certain respects the most valuable of all to the philosophic student of human speech.

Thus, in 1826, he announced before the Berlin Academy that he was preparing an exhaustive work on the “Organism of Language,” for which he had selected the American languages exclusively, as best suited for this purpose. “The languages of a great continent,” he writes, “peopled by numerous nationalities, probably never subject to foreign influence, offer for this branch of linguistic study specially favorable material. There are in America as many as thirty little known languages for which we have means of study, each of which is like a new natural species, besides many others whose data are less ample.”^[269]

In his memoir, read two years later, “On the Origin of Grammatic Forms, and their Influence on the Development of Ideas,” he chose most of his examples from the idioms of the New World;^[270] and the year following, he read the monograph on the Verb in American languages, which I refer to on a later page.

In a subsequent communication, he announced his special study of this group as still in preparation. It was, however, never completed. His earnest desire to reach the fundamental laws of language led him into a long series of investigations into the systems of recorded speech, phonetic hieroglyphics and alphabetic writing, on which he read memoirs of great acuteness.

In one of these he again mentions his studies of the American tongues, and takes occasion to vindicate them from the current charge of being of a low grade in the linguistic scale. “It is certainly unjust,” he writes, “to call the American languages rude or savage, although their structure is widely different from those perfectly formed.”^[271]

In 1828, there is a published letter from him making an appointment with the AbbÉ Thavenet, missionary to the Canadian Algonkins, then in Paris, “to enjoy the pleasure of conversing with him on his interesting studies of the Algonkin language.”^[272] And a private letter tells us that in 1831 he applied himself with new zeal to mastering the intricacies of Mexican grammar.^[273]

All these years he was working to complete the researches which led him to the far-reaching generalization which is at the basis of his linguistic philosophy.

Let me state in a few words what this philosophy teaches.

It aims to establish as a fundamental truth that the diversity of structure in languages is both the necessary antecedent and the necessary consequent of the evolution of the human mind.^[274]

In the establishment of this thesis he begins with a subtle analysis of the nature of speech in general, and then proceeds to define the reciprocal influences which thought exerts upon it, and it upon thought.

It will readily be seen that a corollary of this theorem is that the Science of Language is and must be the most instructive, the indispensable guide in the study of the mental evolution of the human race. Humboldt recognized this fully. He taught that in its highest sense the philosophy of language is one with the philosophy of history. The science of language misses its purpose unless it seeks its chief end in explaining the intellectual growth of the race.^[275]

Each separate tongue is “a thought-world in tones” established between the minds of those who speak it and the objective world without.^[276] Each mirrors in itself the spirit of the nation to which it belongs. But it has also an earlier and independent origin; it is the product of the conceptions of antecedent generations, and thus exerts a formative and directive influence on the national mind, an influence not slight, but more potent than that which the national mind exerts upon it.^[277]

He fully recognized a progress, an organic growth, in human speech. This growth may be from two sources, one the cultivation of a tongue within the nation by enriching its vocabulary, separating and classifying its elements, fixing its expressions, and thus adapting it to wider uses; the second, by forcible amalgamation with another tongue.

The latter exerts always a more profound and often a more beneficial influence. The organism of both tongues may be destroyed, but the dissolvent force is also an organic and vital one, and from the ruins of both constructs a speech of grander plans and with wider views. “The seemingly aimless and confused interminglings of primitive tribes sowed the seed for the flowers of speech and song which flourished in centuries long posterior.”

The immediate causes of the improvement of a language through forcible admixture with another, are: that it is obliged to drop all unnecessary accessory elements in a proposition; that the relations of ideas must be expressed by conventional and not significant syllables; and that the limitations of thought imposed by the genius of the language are violently broken down, and the mind is thus given wider play for its faculties.

Such influences, however, do not act in accordance with fixed laws of growth. There are no such laws which are of universal application. The development of the Mongolian or Aryan tongues is not at all that of the American. The goal is one and the same, but the paths to it are infinite. For this reason each group or class of languages must be studied by itself, and its own peculiar developmental laws be ascertained by searching its history.^[278]

With reference to the growth of American languages, it was Humboldt’s view that they manifest the utmost refractoriness both to external influences and to internal modifications. They reveal a marvellous tenacity of traditional words and forms, not only in dialects, but even in particular classes of the community, men having different expressions from women, the old from the young, the higher from the lower classes. These are maintained with scrupulous exactitude through generations, and three centuries of daily commingling with the white race have scarcely altered their grammar or phonetics.

Nor is this referable to the contrast between an Aryan and an American language. The same immiscibility is shown between themselves. “Even where many radically different languages are located closely together, as in Mexico, I have not found a single example where one exercised a constructive or formative influence on the other. But it is by the encounter of great and contrasted differences that languages gain strength, riches, and completeness. Only thus are the perceptive powers, the imagination and the feelings impelled to enrich and extend the means of expression, which, if left to the labors of the understanding alone, are liable to be but meagre and arid.”^[279]

Humboldt’s one criterion of a language was its tendency to quicken and stimulate mental action. He maintained that this is secured just in proportion as the grammatical structure favors clear definition of the individual idea apart from its relations; in other words, as it separates the material from the inflectional elements of speech. Clear thinking, he argued, means progressive thinking. Therefore he assigned a lower position both to those tongues which inseparably connect the idea with its relations, as most American languages, and to those which, like the Chinese and in a less degree the modern English, have scarcely any formal elements at all, but depend upon the position of words (placement) to signify their relations. But he warns us that it is of importance to recognize fully “that grammatical principles dwell rather in the mind of the speaker than in the material and mechanism of his language,” and that the power of expressing ideas in any tongue depends much more on the intellectual capacity of the speaker than the structure of the tongue itself.

He censures the common error (common now as it was in his day) that the abundance and regularity of forms in a language is a mark of excellence. This very multiplicity, this excessive superfluity, is a burden and a drawback, and obscures the integration of the thought by attaching to it a quantity of needless qualifications. Thus, in the language of the Abipones, the pronoun is different as the person spoken of is conceived as present, absent, sitting, walking, lying or running—all quite unnecessary specifications.^[280]

In some languages much appears as form which, on close scrutiny, is nothing of the kind.

This misunderstanding has reigned almost universally in the treatment of American tongues. The grammars which have been written upon them proceed generally on the principles of Latin, and apply a series of grammatical names to the forms explained, entirely inappropriate to them, and misleading. Our first duty in taking up such a grammar as, for instance, that of an American language, is to dismiss the whole of the arrangement of the “parts of speech,” and by an analysis of words and phrases, to ascertain by what collocation of elements they express logical, significant relations.^[281]

For example, in the Carib tongue, the grammars give aveiridaco as the second person singular, subjunctive imperfect, “if thou wert.” Analyze this, and we discover that a is the possessive pronoun “thy;” veiri is “to be” or “being” (in a place); and daco is a particle of definite time. Hence, the literal rendering is “on the day of thy being.” The so-called imperfect subjunctive turns out to be a verbal noun with a preposition. In many American languages the hypothetical supposition expressed in the Latin subjunctive is indicated by the same circumlocution.

Again, the infinitive, in its classical sense, is unknown in most, probably in all, American languages. In the Tupi of Brazil and frequently elsewhere it is simply a noun; caru is both “to eat” and “food;” che caru ai-pota, “I wish to eat,” literally “my food I wish.”

Many writers continue to maintain that a criterion of a language is its lexicographic richness—the number of words it possesses. Even recently, Prof. Max MÜller has applied such a test to American languages, and, finding that one of the Fuegian dialects is reported to have nearly thirty thousand words, he maintains that this is a proof that these savages are a degenerate remnant of some much more highly developed ancestry. Founding his opinion largely on similar facts, Alexander von Humboldt applied the expression to the American nations that they are “des dÉbris ÉchappÉs À un naufrage commun.”

Such, however, was not the opinion of his brother Wilhelm. He sounded the depths of linguistic philosophy far more deeply than to accept mere abundance of words as proof of richness in a language. Many savage languages have twenty words signifying to eat particular things, but no word meaning “to eat” in general; the Eskimo language has different words for fishing for each kind of fish, but no word “to fish,” in a general sense. Such apparent richness is, in fact, actual poverty.

Humboldt taught that the quality, not merely the quantity, of words was the decisive measure of verbal wealth. Such quality depends on the relations of concrete words, on the one hand, to primitive objective perceptions at their root, and, on the other, to the abstract general ideas of which they are particular representatives; and besides this, on the relations which the spoken word, the articulate sound, bears to the philosophic laws of the formation of language in general.^[282]

In his letter to Abel-Remusat he discusses the theory that the American languages point to a once higher condition of civilization, and are the corrupted idioms of deteriorated races. He denies that there is linguistic evidence of any such theory. These languages, he says, possess a remarkable regularity of structure, and very few anomalies. Their grammar does not present any visible traces of corrupting intermixtures.^[283]

Humboldt’s classification of languages was based on the relation of the word to the sentence, which, expressed in logic, would mean the relation of the simple idea to the proposition. He taught that the plans on which languages combine words into sentences are a basic character of their structure, and divide them into classes as distinct and as decisive of their future, as those of vertebrate and invertebrate animals in natural history.

These plans are four in number:

1. By Isolation.

The words are placed in juxtaposition, without change. Their relations are expressed by their location only (placement). The typical example of this is the Chinese.

2. By Agglutination.

The sentence is formed by suffixing to the word expressive of the main idea a number of others, more or less altered, expressing the relations. Examples of this are the Eskimo of North America, and the Northern Asiatic dialects.

3. By Incorporation.

The leading word of the sentence is divided, and the accessory words either included in it or attached to it with abbreviated forms, so that the whole sentence assumes the form and sound of one word.

4. By Inflection.

Each word of the sentence indicates by its own form the character and relation to the main proposition of the idea it represents. Sanscrit, Greek and Latin are familiar examples of inflected tongues.

It is possible to suppose that all four of these forms were developed from some primitive condition of utterance unknown to us, just as naturalists believe that all organic species were developed out of a homogeneous protoplasmic mass; but it is as hard to see how any one of them in its present form could pass over into another, as to understand how a radiate could change into a mollusk.

Of the four plans mentioned, Incorporation is that characteristic of, though not confined to, American tongues.

The psychological origin of this plan is explained rather curiously by Humboldt, as the result of an exaltation of the imaginative over the intellectual elements of mind. By this method, the linguistic faculty strives to present to the understanding the whole thought in the most compact form possible, thus to facilitate its comprehension; and this it does, because a thought presented in one word is more vivid and stimulating to the imagination, more individual and picturesque, than when narrated in a number of words.^[284]

Incorporation may appear in a higher or a lower grade, but its intention is everywhere the effort to convey in one word the whole proposition. The verb, as that part of speech which especially conveys the synthetic action of the mental operation, is that which is selected as the stem of this word-sentence; all the other parts are subordinate accessories, devoid of syntactic value.

The higher grade of incorporation includes both subject, object and verb in one word, and if for any reason the object is not included, the scheme of the sentence is still maintained in the verb, and the object is placed outside, as in apposition, without case ending, and under a form different from its original and simple one.

This will readily be understood from the following examples from the Mexican language.

The sentence ni-naca-qua is one word, and means “I, flesh, eat.” If it is desired to express the object independently, the expression becomes ni-c-qua-in-nacatl, “I it eat, the flesh.” The termination tl does not belong to the root of the noun, but is added to show that it is in an external and, as it were, unnatural position. Both the direct and remote object can thus be incorporated, and if they are not, but separately appended, the scheme of the sentence is still preserved; as ni-te-tla-maca, literally, “I, to somebody, something, give.” How closely these accessories are incorporated is illustrated by the fact that the tense-augments are not added to the stem, but to the whole word; o-ni-c-temaca-e, where the o is the prefix of the perfect.

In these languages, every element in the sentence which is not incorporated in the verb has, in fact, no syntax at all. The verbal exhausts all the formal portion of the language. The relations of the other words are intimated by their position. Thus ni-tlaÇotlaz-nequia, I wished to love, is literally, “I, I shall love, I wished.” TlaÇotlaz is the first person singular of the future; ni-nequia, I wished; which is divided, and the future form inserted. The same expression may stand thus: ni-c-nequia-tlaÇo-tlaz, where the c is an intercalated relative pronoun, and the literal rendering is, “I it wished, I shall love.”

In the Lule language the construction with an infinitive is simply that the two verbs follow each other in the same person, as caic tucuec, “I am accustomed to eat,” literally, “I am accustomed, I eat.”

None of these devices fulfils all the uses of the infinitive, and hence they are all inferior to it.

In languages which lack formal elements, the deficiency must be supplied by the mind. Words are merely placed in juxtaposition, and their relationship guessed at. Thus, when a language constructs its cases merely by prefixing prepositions to the unaltered noun, there is no grammatical form; in the Mbaya language e-tiboa is translated “through me,” but it is really “I, through;” l’emani, is rendered “he wishes,” but it is strictly, “he, wish.”

In such languages the same collocation of words often corresponds to quite different meanings, as the precise relation of the thoughts is not defined by any formal elements. This is well illustrated in the Tupi tongue. The word uba is “father;” with the pronoun of the third person prefixed it is tuba, literally “he, father.” This may mean either “his father,” or “he is a father,” or “he has a father,” just as the sense of the rest of the sentence requires.

Certainly a language which thus leaves confounded together ideas so distinct as these, is inferior to one which discriminates them; and this is why the formal elements of a tongue are so important to intellectual growth. The Tupis may be an energetic and skillful people, but with their language they can never take a position as masters in the realm of ideas.

The absence of the passive in most American tongues is supplied by similar inadequate collocations of words. In Huasteca, for example, nana tanin tahjal, is translated “I am treated by him;” actually it is, “I, me, treats he.” This is not a passive, but simply the idea of the Ego connected with the idea of another acting upon it.

This is vastly below the level of inflected speech; for it cannot be too strenuously maintained that the grammatical relations of spoken language are the more perfect and favorable to intellectual growth, the more closely they correspond to the logical relations of thought.

Sometimes what appears as inflection turns out on examination to be merely adjunction. Thus in the Mbaya tongue there are such verbal forms as daladi, thou wilt throw, nilabuite, he has spun, where the d is the sign of the future, and the n of the perfect. These look like inflections; but in fact, d is simply a relic of quide, hereafter, later, and n stands in the same relation to quine, which means “and also.”

To become true formal elements, all such adjuncts must have completely lost their independent signification; because if they retain it, their material content requires qualification and relation just as any other stem-word.

A few American languages may have reached this stage. In the Mexican there are the terminals ya or a in the imperfect, the augment o in the preterit and others in the future. In the Tamanaca the present ends in a, the preterit in e, the future in c. “There is nothing in either of these tongues to show that these tense-signs have independent meaning, and therefore there is no reason why they should not be classed with those of the Greek and Sanscrit as true inflectional elements.”^[285]

The theory of Incorporation, it will be noted, is to express the whole proposition, as nearly as possible, in one word; and what part of it cannot be thus expressed, is left without any syntax whatever. Not only does this apply to individual words in a sentence, but it extends to the various clauses of a compound sentence, such as in Aryan languages show their relation to the leading clauses by means of prepositions, conjunctions and relative pronouns.

When the methods are analyzed by which the major and minor clauses are assigned their respective values in these tongues, it is very plain what difficulties of expression the system of Incorporation involves. Few of them have any true connecting word of either of the three classes above mentioned. They depend on scarcely veiled material words, simply placed in juxtaposition.

It is probable that the prepositions and conjunctions of all languages were at first significant words, and the degree to which they have lost their primary significations and have become purely formal elements expressing relation, is one of the measures of the grammatical evolution of a tongue. In most American idioms their origin from substantives is readily recognizable. Frequently these substantives refer to parts of the body, and this, in passing, suggests the antiquity of this class of words and their value in comparison.

In Maya tan means in, toward, among; but it is also the breast or front of the body. The Mexican has three classes of prepositions—the first, whose origin from a substantive cannot be detected; the second, where an unknown and a known element are combined; the third, where the substantive is perfectly clear. An example of the last mentioned is itic, in, compounded of ite, belly, and the locative particle c; the phrase ilhuicatl itic, in heaven, is literally “in the belly of heaven.” Precisely the same is the Cakchiquel pamcah, literally, “belly, heaven”==in heaven. In Mexican, notepotzco is “behind me,” literally, “my back, at;” this corresponds again to the Cakchiquel chuih, behind me, from chi, at, u, my, vih, shoulder-blades. The Mixteca prepositions present the crude nature of their origin without disguise, chisi huahi, belly, house—that is, in front of the house; sata huahi, back, house—behind the house.

The conjunctions are equally transparent. “And” in Maya is yetel, in Mexican ihuan. One would suppose that such an indispensable connective would long since have been worn down to an insoluble entity. On the contrary, both these words retain their perfect material meaning. Yetel is a compound of y, his, et, companion, and el, the definite termination of nouns. Ihuan is the possessive, i, and huan, associate companion, used also as a termination to form a certain class of plurals.

The deficiency in true conjunctions and relative pronouns is met in many American languages by a reversal of the plan of expression with us. The relative clause becomes the principal one. There is a certain logical justice in this; for if we reflect, it will appear evident that the major proposition is in our construction presented as one of the conditions of the minor. “I shall drown, if I fall in the water,” means that, of the various results of my falling in the water, one of them will be that I shall drown. “I follow the road which you described,” means that you described a road, and one of the results of this act of yours was that I follow it.

This explains the plan of constructing compound sentences in Qquichua. Instead of saying “I shall follow the road which you describe,” the construction is, “You describe, this road I shall follow;” and instead of “I shall drown if I fall in the water,” it would be, “I fall in the water, I shall drown.”

The Mexican language introduces the relative clause by the word in, which is an article and demonstrative pronoun, or, if the proposition is a conditional one, by intla, which really signifies “within this,” and conveys the sense that the major is included within the conditions of the minor clause. The Cakchiquel conditional particle is vue, if, which appears to be simply the particle of affirmation “yes,” employed to give extension to the minor clause, which, as a rule, is placed first.

Or a conventional arrangement of words may be adopted which will convey the idea of certain dependent clauses, as those expressing similitude, as is often the case in Mexican.

About 1822 Humboldt read a memoir before the Berlin Academy on “The American Verb,” which remained unpublished either in German or English until I translated and printed it in the Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society in 1885. At its close he sums up his results, and this summary will form an appropriate conclusion to the present review of his labors in the field of American linguistics:

“If we reflect on the structure of the various verbal forms here analyzed, certain general conclusions are reached, which are calculated to throw light upon the whole organism of these languages.

“The leading and governing part of speech in them is the Pronoun; every subject of discourse is connected with the idea of Personality.

“Noun and Verb are not separated; they first become so through the pronoun attached to them.

“The employment of the Pronoun is two-fold, one applying to the Noun, the other to the Verb. Both, however, convey the idea of belonging to a person—in the noun appearing as Possession, in the verb as Energy. But it is on this point, on whether these ideas are confused and obscure, or whether they are defined and clear, that the grammatical perfection of a language depends. The just discrimination of the kinds of pronouns is therefore conclusive, and in this respect we must yield the decided pre-eminence to the Mexican.

“It follows that the speaker must constantly make up his verbs, instead of using those already on hand; and also that the structure of the verb must be identical throughout the language, that there must be only one conjugation, and that the verbs, except a few irregular ones, can possess no peculiarities.

“This is different in the Greek, Latin and ancient Indian. In these tongues many verbs must be studied separately, as they have numerous exceptions, phonetic changes, deficiencies, etc., and in other respects carry with them a marked individuality.

“The difference between these cultivated and those rude languages is chiefly merely one of time, and of the more or less fortunate mixture of dialects; though it certainly also depends in a measure on the original mental powers of the nations.

“Those whose languages we have here analyzed are, in speaking, constantly putting together elementary parts; they connect nothing firmly, because they follow the changing requirements of the moment, joining together only what these requirements demand, and often leave connected through habit that which clear thinking would necessarily divide.

“Hence no just division of words can arise, such as is demanded by accurate and appropriate thought, which requires that each word must have a fixed and certain content and a defined grammatical form, and as is also demanded by the highest phonetic laws.

“Nations richly endowed in mind and sense will have an instinct for such correct divisions; the incessant moving to and fro of elementary parts of speech will be distasteful to them; they will seek true individuality in the words they use; therefore they will connect them firmly, they will not accumulate too much in one, and they will only leave that connected which is so in thought, and not merely in usage or habit.”

Contents.—Study of the human species on the geographic system—Have American languages any common trait?—Duponceau’s theory of polysynthesis—Humboldt on Polysynthesis and Incorporation—Francis Lieber on Holophrasis—Prof. Steinthal on the incorporative plan—Lucien Adam’s criticism of it—Prof. MÜller’s inadequate statement—Major Powell’s omission to consider it—Definitions of polysynthesis, incorporation and holophrasis—Illustrations—Critical application of the theory to the Othomi language—To the Bri-bri language—To the Tupi-Guarani dialects—To the Mutsun—Conclusions—Addendum: critique by M. Adam on this essay.

As the careful study of the position of man toward his surroundings advances, it becomes more and more evident that like other members of the higher fauna, he bears many and close correlations to the geographical area he inhabits. Hence the present tendency of anthropology is to return to the classification proposed by LinnÆus, which, in a broad way, subdivides the human species with reference to the continental areas mainly inhabited by it in the earliest historic times. This is found to accord with color, and to give five sub-species or races, the White or European, the Black or African, the Yellow or Mongolian (Asiatic), the Brown or Malayan (Oceanic), and the Red or American Races.

No ethnologist nowadays will seek to establish fixed and absolute lines between these. They shade into one another in all their peculiarities, and no one has traits entirely unknown in the others. Yet, in the mass, the characteristics of each are prominent, permanent and unmistakable; and to deny them on account of occasional exceptions is to betray an inability to estimate the relative value of scientific facts.

Does this racial similarity extend to language? On the surface, apparently not. Only one of the races named—the Malayan—is monoglottic. All the others seem to speak tongues with no genetic relationship, at least none indicated by etymology. The profounder study of language, however, leads to a different conclusion—to one which, as cautiously expressed by a recent writer, teaches that “every large, connected, terrestrial area developed only one, or scarcely more than one, fundamental linguistic type, and this with such marked individuality that rarely did any of its languages depart from the general scheme.”^[287]

This similarity is not to be looked for in likeness between words, but in the inner structural development of tongues. To ascertain and estimate such identities is a far more delicate undertaking than to compare columns of words in vocabularies; but it is proportionately more valuable.

Nor should we expect it to be absolute. The example of the Basque in a pure white nation in Western Europe warns us that there are exceptions which, though they may find a historic explanation, forbid us all dogmatic assertion. They are so few, however, that I quote Dr. Winkler’s words as the correct expression of the latest linguistic science, and I wish that some investigator would make it the motto of his study of American tongues.

The task—no light one—which such an investigator would have, would be, first to ascertain what structural traits form the ground plan or plans (if there are more than one) of the languages of the New World. Upon this ground-plan he would find very different edifices have been erected, which, nevertheless, can be classified into groups, each group marked by traits common to every member of it. These traits and groups he must carefully define. Then would come the separate question as to whether this community of traits has a genetic explanation or not. If the decision were affirmative, we might expect conclusions that would carry us much further than etymological comparisons, and might form a scientific basis for the classification of American nations.

Possibly some one or two features might be discovered which though not peculiar to American tongues, nor fully present in every one of them, yet would extend an influence over them all, and impart to them in the aggregate a certain aspect which could fairly be called distinctive. Such features are claimed to have been found in the grammatic processes of polysynthesis and incorporation.

Peter Stephen Duponceau, at one time President of the American Philosophical Society, was the first to assert that there was a prevailing unity of grammatic schemes in American tongues. His first published utterance was in 1819, when he distinguished, though not with desirable lucidity, between the two varieties of synthetic construction, the one (incorporation) applicable to verbal forms of expression, the other (polysynthesis) to nominal expressions. His words are—

“A polysynthetic or syntactic construction of language is that in which the greatest number of ideas are comprised in the least number of words. This is done principally in two ways. 1. By a mode of compounding locutions which is not confined to joining two words together, as in Greek, or varying the inflection or termination of a radical word as in most European languages, but by interweaving together the most significant sounds or syllables of each simple word, so as to form a compound that will awaken in the mind at once all the ideas singly expressed by the words from which they are taken. 2. By an analogous combination [of] the various parts of speech, particularly by means of the verb, so that its various forms and inflections will express not only the principal action, but the greatest possible number of the moral ideas and physical objects connected with it, and will combine itself to the greatest extent with those conceptions which are the subject of other parts of speech, and in other languages require to be expressed by separate and distinct words. Such I take to be the general character of the Indian languages.”^[288]

Duponceau’s opinion found an able supporter in Wilhelm von Humboldt, who, as already shown, placed the American languages among those acting on the incorporative plan—das Einverleibungssystem. The spirit of this system he defines to be, “to impress the unity of the sentence on the understanding by treating it, not as a whole composed of various words, but as one word.” A perfect type of incorporation will group all the elements of the sentence in and around the verbal, as this alone is the bond of union between the several ideas. The designation of time and manner, that is, the tense and mode signs, will include both the object and subject of the verb, thus subordinating them to the notion of action. It is “an indispensable basis” of this system that there should be a difference in the form of words when incorporated and when not. This applies in a measure to nouns and verbals, but especially to pronouns, and Humboldt names it as “the characteristic tendency” of American languages, and one directly drawn from their incorporative plan, that the personal pronouns, both subjective and objective, used in connection with the verbs, are of a different form from the independent personal pronouns, either greatly abbreviated or from wholly different roots. Outside of the verbal thus formed as the central point of the sentence, there is no syntax, no inflections, no declension of nouns or adjectives.^[289]

Humboldt was far from saying that the incorporative system was exclusively seen in American languages, any more than that of isolation in Chinese, or flexion in Aryan speech. On the contrary, he distinctly states that every language he had examined shows traces of all three plans; but the preponderance of one plan over the other is so marked and so distinctive that they afford us the best means known for the morphological classification of languages, especially as these traits arise from psychological operations widely diverse, and of no small influence on the development of the intellect.

Dr. Francis Lieber, in an essay on “The Plan of Thought in American Languages,”^[290] objected to the terms polysynthesis and incorporation that “they begin at the wrong end; for these names indicate that that which has been separated is put together, as if man began with analysis, whereas he ends with it.” He therefore proposed the noun holophrasis with its adjective holophrastic, not as a substitute for the terms he criticised, but to express the meaning or purpose of these processes, which is, to convey the whole of a sentence or proposition in one word. Polysynthesis, he explains, indicates a purely etymological process, holophrasis “refers to the meaning of the word considered in a philosophical point of view.”

If we regard incorporation and polysynthesis as structural processes of language aiming to accomplish a certain theoretical form of speech, then it will be convenient to have this word holophrasis to designate this theoretical form, which is, in short, the expression of the whole proposition in a single word.

The eminent linguist Professor H. Steinthal, has developed the theory of incorporation more fully than any other writer. He expresses himself without reserve of the opinion that all American languages are constructed on this same plan, more or less developed.

I need not make long quotations from a work so well-known as his Charakteristik der hauptsÄchlichsten Typen des Sprachbaues, one section of which, about thirty pages in length, is devoted to a searching and admirable presentation of the characteristics of the incorporative plan as shown in American languages. But I may give with brevity what he regards as the most striking features of this plan. These are especially three:—

1. The construction of words by a mixed system of derivation and new formation.

2. The objective relation is treated as a species of possession; and

3. The possessive relation is regarded as the leading and substantial one, and controls the form of expression.

The first of these corresponds to what I should call polysynthesis; the others to incorporation in the limited sense of the term.

Some special studies on this subject have been published by M. Lucien Adam, and he claims for them that they have refuted and overturned the thesis of Duponceau, Humboldt, and Steinthal, to the effect that there is a process called incorporative or polysynthetic, which can be traced in all American languages, and though not in all points confined to them, may fairly and profitably be taken as characteristic of them, and indicative of the psychological processes which underlie them. This opinion M. Adam speaks of as a “stereotyped phrase which is absolutely false.”^[291]

So rude an iconoclasm as this must attract our careful consideration. Let us ask what M. Adam understands by the terms polysynthesis and incorporation. To our surprise, we shall find that in two works published in the same year, he advances definitions by no means identical. Thus, in his “Examination of Sixteen American Languages,” he says, “Polysynthesis consists essentially in the affixing of subordinate personal pronouns to the noun, the preposition and the verb.” In his “Study of Six Languages,” he writes: “By polysynthesis I understand the expression in one word of the relations of cause and effect, or of subject and object.”^[292]

Certainly these two definitions are not convertible, and we are almost constrained to suspect that the writer who gives them was not clear in his own mind as to the nature of the process. At any rate, they differ widely from the plan or method set forth by Humboldt and Steinthal as characteristic of American languages. M. Adam in showing that polysynthesis in his understanding of the term is not confined to or characteristic of American tongues, missed the point, and fell into an ignoratio elenchi.

Equally narrow is his definition of incorporation. He writes, “When the object is intercalated between the subject and the verbal theme, there is incorporation.” If this is to be understood as an explanation of the German expression, Einverleibung, then it has been pared down until nothing but the stem is left.

As to Dr. Lieber’s suggestion of holophrastic as an adjective expressing the plan of thought at the basis of polysynthesis and incorporation, M. Adam summarily dismisses it as “a pedantic succedaneum” to our linguistic vocabulary.

I cannot acknowledge that the propositions so carefully worked up by Humboldt and Steinthal have been refuted by M. Adam; I must say, indeed, that the jejune significance he attaches to the incorporative process seems to show that he did not grasp it as a structural motive in language, and a wide-reaching psychologic process.

Professor Friedrich MÜller, whose studies of American languages are among the most extended and profitable of the present time, has not given to this peculiar feature the attention we might reasonably expect. Indeed, there appears in the standard treatise on the science of language which he has published, almost the same vagueness as to the nature of incorporation which I have pointed out in the writings of M. Adam. Thus, on one page he defines incorporating languages as those which “do away with the distinction between the word and the sentence;” while on another he explains incorporation as “the including of the object within the body of the verb.”^[293] He calls it “a peculiarity of most American languages, but not of all.” That the structural process of incorporation is by no means exhausted by the reception of the object within the body of the verb, even that this is not requisite to incorporation, I shall endeavor to show.

Finally, I may close this brief review of the history of these doctrines with a reference to the fact that neither of them appears anywhere mentioned in the official “Introduction to the Study of Indian Languages,” issued by the United States Bureau of Ethnology! How the author of that work, Major J. W. Powell, Director of the Bureau, could have written a treatise on the study of American languages, and have not a word to say about these doctrines, the most salient and characteristic features of the group, is to me as inexplicable as it is extraordinary. He certainly could not have supposed that Duponceau’s theory was completely dead and laid to rest, for Steinthal, the most eminent philosophic linguist of the age, still teaches in Berlin, and teaches what I have already quoted from him about these traits. What is more, Major Powell does not even refer to this structural plan, nor include it in what he terms the “grammatic processes” which he explains.^[294] This is indeed the play of “Hamlet” with the part of Hamlet omitted!

I believe that for the scientific study of language, and especially of American languages, it will be profitable to restore and clearly to differentiate the distinction between polysynthesis and incorporation, dimly perceived by Duponceau and expressed by him in the words already quoted. With these may be retained the neologism of Lieber, holophrasis, and the three defined as follows:

Polysynthesis is a method of word-building, applicable either to nominals or verbals, which not only employs juxtaposition with aphÆresis, syncope, apocope, etc., but also words, forms of words and significant phonetic elements which have no separate existence apart from such compounds. This latter peculiarity marks it off altogether from the processes of agglutination and collocation.

Incorporation, Einverleibung, is a structural process confined to verbals, by which the nominal or pronominal elements of the proposition are subordinated to the verbal elements, either in form or position; in the former case having no independent existence in the language in the form required by the verb, and in the latter case being included within the specific verbal signs of tense and mood. In a fully incorporative language the verbal exhausts the syntax of the grammar, all other parts of speech remaining in isolation and without structural connection.

Holophrasis does not refer to structural peculiarities of language, but to the psychologic impulse which lies at the root of polysynthesis and incorporation. It is the same in both instances—the effort to express the whole proposition in one word. This in turn is instigated by the stronger stimulus which the imagination receives from an idea conveyed in one word rather than in many.

A few illustrations will aid in impressing these definitions on the mind.

As polysynthetic elements, we have the inseparable possessive pronouns which in many languages are attached to the names of the parts of the human body and to the words for near relatives; also the so-called “generic formatives,” particles which are prefixed, suffixed, or inserted to indicate to what class or material objects belong; also the “numeral terminations” affixed to the ordinal numbers to indicate the nature of the objects counted; the negative, diminutive and amplificative particles which convey certain conceptions of a general character, and so on. These are constantly used in word-building, but are generally not words themselves, having no independent status in the language. They may be single letters, or even merely vowel-changes and consonantal substitutions; but they have well-defined significance.

In incorporation the object may be united to the verbal theme either as a prefix, suffix or infix; or, as in Nahuatl, etc., a pronominal representative of it may be thus attached to the verb, while the object itself is placed in isolated apposition.

The subject is usually a pronoun inseparably connected, or at least included within the tense-sign; to this the nominal subject stands in apposition. Both subjective and objective pronouns are apt to have a different form from either the independent personals or possessives, and this difference of form may be accepted as a priori evidence of the incorporative plan of structure—though there are other possible origins for it. The tense and mode signs are generally separable, and, especially in the compound tense, are seen to apply not only to the verb itself, but to the whole scope of its action, the tense sign for instance preceding the subject.

Some further observations will set these peculiarities in a yet clearer light.

Although in polysynthesis we speak of prefixes, suffixes, and juxtaposition, we are not to understand these terms as the same as in connection with the Aryan or with the agglutinative languages. In polysynthetic tongues they are not intended to form words, but sentences; not to express an idea, but a proposition. This is a fundamental logical distinction between the two classes of languages.

With certain prefixes, as those indicating possession, the form of the word itself alters, as in Mexican, amatl, book, no, mine, but namauh, my book. In a similar manner suffixes or postpositions affect the form of the words to which they are added.

As the holophrastic method makes no provision for the syntax of the sentence outside of the expression of action (i. e., the verbal and what it embraces), nouns and adjectives are not declined. The “cases” which appear in many grammars of American languages are usually indications of space or direction, or of possession, and not case-endings in the sense of Aryan grammar.

A further consequence of the same method is the absence of true relative pronouns, of copulative conjunctions, and generally of the machinery of dependent clauses. The devices to introduce subordinate propositions I have referred to in a previous essay (above, p. 346).

As the effort to speak in sentences rather than in words entails constant variation in these word-sentences, there arise both an enormous increase in verbal forms and a multiplication of expressions for ideas closely allied. This is the cause of the apparently endless conjugations of many such tongues, and also of the exuberance of their vocabularies in words of closely similar signification. It is an ancient error—which, however, I find repeated in the official “Introduction to the Study of Indian Languages,” issued by our Bureau of Ethnology—that the primitive condition of languages is one “where few ideas are expressed by few words.” On the contrary, languages structurally at the bottom of the scale have an enormous and useless excess of words. The savage tribes of the plains will call a color by three or four different words as it appears on different objects. The Eskimo has about twenty words for fishing, depending on the nature of the fish pursued. All this arises from the “holophrastic” plan of thought.

It will be seen from these explanations that the definition of Incorporation as given by M. Lucien Adam (quoted above) is erroneous, and that of Professor MÜller is inadequate. The former reduces it to a mere matter of position or placement; the latter either does not distinguish it from polysynthesis, or limits it to only one of its several expressions.

In fact, Incorporation may take place with any one of the six possible modifications of the grammatical formula, “subject + verb + object.” It is quite indifferent to its theory which of these comes first, which last; although the most usual formula is either,

the verb being understood to be the verbal theme only—not its tense and mode signs. Where either of the above arrangements occurs, we may consider it to be an indication of the incorporative tendency; but as mere position is insufficient evidence, incorporation may be present in other arrangements of the elements of the proposition.

As a fair example of polysynthesis in nouns, we may select the word for “cross” in the Cree. The Indians render it by “praying-stick” or “holy wood,” and their word for “our praying-sticks” (crosses) is:

This is analyzed as follows:

n't', possessive pronoun, ½ person plural.

ayami, something relating to religion.

he, indicative termination of the foregoing.

w, a connective.

Âttik, suffix indicating wooden or of wood.

u, a connective.

m, sign of possession.

i, a connective.

nÂn, termination of ? person plural.

ak, termination of animate plural (the cross is spoken of as animate by a figure of speech).

Not a single one of the above elements can be employed as an independent word. They are all only the raw material to weave into and make up words.

As a characteristic specimen of incorporation we may select this Nahuatl word-sentence:

which is analyzed as follows:

Here it will be observed that between the tense-signs, which are logically the essential limitations of the action, are included both the agent and the near and remote objects of the action.

In the modifications of meaning they undergo, American verbal themes may be divided into two great classes, either as they express these modifications (1) by suffixes to an unchanging radical, or (2) by internal changes of their radical.

The last mentioned are most characteristic of synthetic tongues. In all pure dialects of the Algonkin the vowel of the verbal root undergoes a peculiar change called “flattening” when the proposition passes from the “positive” to the “suppositive” mood.^[295] The same principle is strikingly illustrated in the Choctaw language, as the following example will show:^[296]

This example is, however, left far behind by the Qquichua of Peru, which by a series of so-called “verbal particles” affixed to the verbal theme confers an almost endless variety of modification on its verbs. Thus Anchorena in his Grammar gives the form and shades of meaning of 675 modifications of the verb munay, to love.^[297]

These verbal particles are not other words, as adverbs, etc., qualifying the meaning of the verb and merely added to it, but have no independent existence in the language. Von Tschudi, whose admirable analysis of this interesting tongue cannot be too highly praised, explains them as “verbal roots which never reached independent development, or fragments handed down from some earlier epoch of the evolution of the language.”^[298] They are therefore true synthetic elements in the sense of Duponceau’s definition, and not at all examples of collocation or juxtaposition.

While the genius of American languages is such that they permit and many of them favor the formation of long compounds which express the whole of a sentence in one word, this is by no means necessary. Most of the examples of words of ten, twenty or more syllables are not genuine native words, but novelties manufactured by the missionaries. In ordinary intercourse such compounds are not in use, and the speech is comparatively simple.

Of two of the most synthetic languages, the Algonkin and the Nahuatl, we have express testimony from experts that they can be employed in simple or compound forms, as the speaker prefers. The AbbÉ Lacombe observes that in Cree “sometimes one can employ very long words to express a whole phrase, although the same ideas can be easily rendered by periphrasis.”^[299] In the syllabus of the lectures on the Nahuatl by Prof. Agustin de la Rosa, of the University of Guadalaxara, I note that he explains when the Nahuatl is to be employed in a synthetic, and when in an analytic form.^[300]

I shall now proceed to examine those American tongues which have been authoritatively declared to be exceptions to the general rules of American grammar, as being devoid of the incorporative and polysynthetic character.

THE OTHOMI.^[301]

As I have said, the Othomi was the stumbling block of Mr. Duponceau, and led him to abandon his theory of polysynthesis as a characteristic of American tongues. Although in his earlier writings he expressly names it as one of the illustrations supporting his theory, later in life the information he derived from SeÑor Emmanuel Naxera led him to regard it as an isolating and monosyllabic language, quite on a par with the Chinese. He expressed this change of view in the frankest manner, and since that time writers have spoken of the Othomi as a marked exception in structure to the general rules of synthesis in American tongues. This continues to be the case even in the latest writings, as, for instance, in the recently published Anthropologie du Mexique, of Dr. Hamy.^[302]

Let us examine the grounds of this opinion.

The Othomis are an ancient and extended family, who from the remotest traditional epochs occupied the central valleys and mountains of Mexico north of the Aztecs and Tezcucans. Their language, called by themselves nhiÂn hiÛ, the fixed or current speech^[303] (nhiÂn, speech, hiÛ, stable, fixed), presents extraordinary phonetic difficulties on account of its nasals, gutturals and explosives.

It is one of a group of related dialects which may be arranged as follows:

{	The Othomi.
	The Mazahua.
	The Pame and its dialects.
	The Meco or Jonaz.

It was the opinion of M. Charencey, that another member of this group was the Pirinda or Matlazinca; a position combatted by SeÑor Pimentel, who acknowledges some common property in words, but considers them merely borrowed.^[304]

Naxera made the statement that the Mazahua is monosyllabic, an error in which his copyists have obediently followed him; but Pimentel pointedly contradicts this assertion and shows that it is a mistake, both for the Mazahua and for the Pame and its dialects.^[305]

We may begin our study of the language with an examination of the

Tense-signs in Othomi.
PRESENT TENSE.
1. I wish,	di nee.
2. Thou wishest,	gui nee.
3. He wishes,	y nee.
PAST AORIST.
1. I wished,	da nee.
2. Thou wished,	ga nee.
3. He wished,	bi nee.
PERFECT.
1. I have wished,	xta nee.
2. Thou hast wished,	xca nee.
3. He has wished,	xpi nee.
PLUPERFECT.
1. I had wished,	xta nee hma.
2. Thou hadst wished,	xca nee hma.
3. He had wished,	xpi nee hma.
FIRST FUTURE.
1. I shall wish,	ga nee.
2. Thou wilt wish,	gui nee.
3. He will wish,	da nee.
SECOND FUTURE.
1. I shall have wished,	gua xta nee.
2. Thou wilt have wished,	gua xca nee.
3. He will have wished,	gua xpi nee.

The pronouns here employed are neither the ordinary personals nor possessives (though the Othomi admits of a possessive conjugation), but are verbal pronouns, strictly analogous to those found in various other American languages. The radicals are:

I,	d—.
Thou,	g—.
He, it,	b—.

In the present, the first and second are prefixed to what is really the simple concrete form of the verb, y-nee. In the past tenses the personal signs are variously united with particles denoting past time or the past, as a, the end, to finish, ma and hma, yesterday, and the prefix x, which is very noteworthy as being precisely the same in sound and use which we find in the Cakchiquel past and future tenses. It is pronounced sh (as in shove) and precedes the whole verbal, including subject, object, and theme; while in the pluperfect, the second sign of past time hma is a suffix to the collective expression.

The future third person is given by Neve as da, but by Perez as di, which latter is apparently from the future particle ni given by Neve. In the second future, the distinctive particle gua precedes the whole verbal, thus inclosing the subject with the theme in the tense-sign, strictly according to the principles of the incorporative conjugation.

This incorporative character is still more marked in the objective conjugations, or “transitions.” The object, indeed, follows the verb, but is not only incorporated with it, but in the compound tense is included within the double tense signs.

Thus, I find in Perez’s Catechism,

di	Ûn-ba	magetzi,
He will	give-them	heaven.

In this sentence, di is the personal pronoun combined with the future sign; and the verb is Ûn-ni, to give to another, which is compounded with the personal ba, them, drops its final syllable, forming a true synthesis.

In the phrase,

xpi	Ûn-ba	hma	magetzi,
he had	give them	(had)	heaven,

both subject and object, the latter inclosed in a synthesis with the radical of the theme, the former phonetically altered and coalesced with a tense particle, are included in the double tense-sign, x-hma. This is as real an example of incorporation as can be found in any American language.

Ordinary synthesis of words, other than verbs, is by no means rare in Othomi. Simple juxtaposition, which Naxera states to be the rule, is not all universal. Such a statement by him leads us to suspect that he had only that elementary knowledge of the tongue which Neve refers to in a forcible passage in his Reglas. He writes: “A good share of the difficulty of this tongue lies in its custom of syncope; and because the tyros who make use of it do not syncopate it, their compositions are so rough and lacking in harmony to the ears of the natives that the latter count their talk as no better than that of horse-jockeys, as we would say.”^[306]

The extent of this syncopation is occasionally to such a degree that only a fragment of the original word is retained. As:

Here na is a demonstrative particle like the Aztec in, and mathi is a compound pÀ, to sell, and thÊhÑÂ, charcoal.

The expression,

is to be analyzed,

y	mÂhdÎ	nuny	oqha;
he	loves	him	God;

where we perceive not only synthesis, but the object standing in apposition to the pronoun representing it which is incorporated with the verb.

So: yot-gua, light here; from yotti, to light, nugua, here.

These examples from many given in Neve’s work seem to me to prove beyond cavil that the Othomi exhibits, when properly spoken, precisely the same theories of incorporation and polysynthesis as the other American languages, although undoubtedly its more monosyllabic character and the extreme complexity of its phonetics do not permit of a development of these peculiarities to the same degree as many.

Nor am I alone in this opinion. It has already been announced by the Count de Charencey, as the result of his comparison of this tongue with the Mazahua and Pirinda. “The Othomi,” he writes, “has all the appearance of a language which was at first incorporative, and which, worn down by attrition and linguistic decay, has at length come to simulate a language of juxtaposition.”^[307]

Some other peculiarities of the language, though not directly bearing on the question, point in the same direction. A certain class of compound verbs are said by Neve to have a possessive declension. Thus, of the two words puengui, he draws, and hiÂ, breath, is formed the verb buehiÂ, which is conjugated by using the verb in the indefinite third person and inserting the possessives ma, ni, na, my, thy, his; thus,

Literally this would be “it-is-drawing, my breath,” etc.

In the Mazahua dialects there is a remarkable change in the objective conjugations (transitions) where the whole form of the verb appears to alter. In this language ti = I; ki or khe = thou.

The last example is not fully explained by my authorities; but it shows the verbal change.

Something like this occurs in the Pame dialects. They reveal a manifest indifference to the integrity of the theme, characteristic of polysynthetic languages. Thus, our only authority on the Pame, Father Juan Guadalupe Soriano, gives the preterit forms of the verb “to aid:”

So, of “to burn:”

Knu aum, I burned.

Kuddu du taum, they burned.^[310]

A large number of such changes run through the conjugation. Pimentel calls them phonetic changes, but they are certainly, in some instances, true syntheses.

All these traits of the Othomi and its related dialects serve to place them unquestionably within the general plan of structure of American languages.

THE BRI-BRI LANGUAGE.

The late Mr. Wm. M. Gabb, who was the first to furnish any satisfactory information about it and its allied dialects in Costa Rica, introduces the Bri-Bri language, spoken in the highlands of that State, by quoting the words of Alexander von Humboldt to the effect that “a multiplicity of tenses characterizes the rudest American languages.” On this, Mr. Gabb comments: “This certainly does not apply to the Costa Rican family, which is equally remarkable for the simplicity of its inflections.”^[311]

This statement, offered with such confidence, has been accepted and passed on without close examination by several unusually careful linguists. Thus Professor Friedrich MÜller, in his brief description of the Bri-Bri (taken exclusively from Gabb’s work), inserts the observation—“The simple structure of this idiom is sufficient to contradict the theories generally received about American languages.”^[312] And M. Lucien Adam has lately instanced its verbs as notable examples of inflectional simplicity.^[313] The study of this group of tongues becomes, therefore, of peculiar importance to my present topic.

Since Mr. Gabb published his memoir, some independent material, grammatical as well as lexicographical, has been furnished by the Rt. Rev. B. A. Thiel, Bishop of Costa Rica,^[314] and I have obtained, in addition, several MS. vocabularies and notes on the language prepared by Prof. P. J. J. Valentini and others.

The stock is divided into three groups of related dialects, as follows:—

I. The Brunka, Bronka or Boruca, now in southwestern Costa Rica, but believed by Gabb to have been the earliest of the stock to occupy the soil, and to have been crowded out by later arrivals.

II. The Tiribi and Terraba, principally on the head-waters of the Rio Telorio and south of the mountains.

III. The Bri-Bri and Cabecar on the head-waters of the Rio Tiliri. The Biceitas (Vizeitas) or Cachis, near the mouth of the same stream, are off-shoots of the Bri-Bris; so also are the small tribes at Orosi and Tucurrique, who were removed to those localities by the Spaniards.

The Bri-Bri and Cabecar, although dialects of the same original speech, are not sufficiently alike to be mutually intelligible. The Cabecars occupied the land before the Bri-Bris, but were conquered and are now subject to them. It is probable that their dialect is more archaic.

The Bri-Bri is a language of extreme poverty, and as spoken at present is plainly corrupt. Gabb estimates the whole number of words it contains as probably not exceeding fifteen hundred. Some of these, though Gabb thinks not very many, are borrowed from the Spanish; but it is significant, that among them is the pronoun “that,” the Spanish ese.

Let us now examine the Bri-Bri verb, said to be so singularly simple. We are at once struck by Mr. Gabb’s remark (just after he has been speaking of their unparalleled simplicity) that the inflections he gives “have been verified with as much care as the difficulties of the case would admit.” Evidently, then, there were difficulties. What they are, becomes apparent when we attempt to analyze the forms of the eighteen brief paradigms which he gives.

The personal pronouns are

je, I.	sa, we.
be, thou.	ha, you.
ye, he, etc.	ye-pa, they.

These are both nominative and objective, personal and, with the suffix cha, possessives.

The tenses are usually, not always, indicated by suffixes to the theme; but these vary, and no rule is given for them, nor is it stated whether the same theme can be used with them all. Thus,

To burn, i-norka,	present,	i-nyor-ket-ke.
To cook, i-lu’.	“	i-luk.
To start, i-be-te.	“	i-be-te.

Here are three forms for the present, not explained. Are they three conjugations, or do they express three shades of meaning, like the three English presents? I suspect the latter, for under ikiana, to want, Gabb remarks that the form in -etke, means “he wants you,” i. e., is emphatic.

The past aorist has two terminations, one in -na, and one in -e, about the uses and meanings of which we are left equally in the dark.

The future is utterly inexplicable. Even Prof. MÜller, just after his note calling attention to the “great simplicity” of the tongue, is obliged to give up this tense with the observation, “the structural laws regulating the formation of the future are still in obscurity!” Was it not somewhat premature to dwell on the simplicity of a tongue whose simplest tenses he acknowledges himself unable to analyze?

The futures of some verbs will reveal the difficulties of this tense:—

To burn, i-nyor-ka;	future,	i-nyor-wane-ka.
To cook, i-lu’;	”	i-lu’.
To start, i-bete;	”	i-bete.
To want, i-ki-ana;	”	i-kie.
To count, ishtaung;	”	mia shta’we.

In the last example mia is the future of the verb imia, to go, and is used as an auxiliary.

The explanation I have to suggest for these varying forms is, either that they represent in fact that very “multiplicity of tense-formations” which Humboldt alluded to, and which were too subtle to be apprehended by Mr. Gabb within the time he devoted to the study of the language; or that they are in modern Bri-Bri, which I have shown is noticeably corrupted, survivals of these formations, but are now largely disregarded by the natives themselves.

Signs of the incorporative plan are not wanting in the tongue. Thus in the objective conjugation not only is the object placed between subject and verb, but the latter may undergo visible synthetic changes. Thus:

In the latter sentence na is the sign of the past aorist, and the verb in synthesis with it drops its last syllable. The wai Gabb could not explain. It will be noticed that the negative precedes the whole verbal form, thus indicating that it is treated as a collective idea (holophrastically).

Prepositions always appear as suffixes to nouns, which, in composition, may suffer elision. This is strictly similar to the Nahuatl and other synthetic tongues.

Other examples of developed synthesis are not uncommon, as—

The opinion that the Bri-Bri is at present a considerably corrupted and worn-down dialect of a group of originally highly synthetic tongues is borne out by an examination of the scanty materials we have of its nearest relations.

Thus in the Terraba we find the same superfluous richness of pronominal forms which occurs in many South American tongues, one indicating that the person is sitting, another that he is standing, a third that he is walking.^[315]

The Brunka has several distinct forms in the present tense:

Although Bishop Thiel supplies a number of verbal forms from this dialect, the plan of their construction is not obvious. This is seen from a comparison of the present and perfect tenses in various words. The pronouns are—

?	atqui, I.
	ique, he.

For instance:

These examples are sufficient to show that the Brunka conjugations are neither regular nor simple, and such is the emphatic statement of Bishop Thiel, both of it and all these allied dialects. In his introduction he states that he is not yet ready to offer a grammar of these tongues, though well supplied with lexicographical materials, and that “their verbs are especially difficult.”^[316]

The Cabecar dialect, in which he gives several native funeral poems, without translations, is apparently more complicated than the Bri-Bri. The words of the songs are long and seem much syncopated.

THE TUPI-GUARANI DIALECTS.

Several writers of the highest position have asserted that these dialects, spoken over so large a portion of the territory of Brazil, are neither polysynthetic nor incorporative. Thus the late Prof. Charles F. Hartt in his “Notes on the Lingoa Geral or Modern Tupi,” expressed himself: “Unlike the North American Indian tongues, the languages of the Tupi-Guarani family are not polysynthetic in structure.”^[317] With scarcely less positiveness Professor Fredrich MÜller writes: “The objective conjugation of the Tupi-Guarani does not show the incorporation usually seen in American languages, but rather a mere collocation.”^[318]

It is, I acknowledge, somewhat hazardous to venture an opinion contrary to such excellent authorities. But I must say, that while, no doubt, the Tupi in its structure differs widely from the Algonkin or Nahuatl, it yet seems to present unmistakable signs of an incorporative and polysynthetic character, such as would be difficult to parallel outside of America.

I am encouraged to maintain this by the recent example of the erudite Dr. Amaro Cavalcanti, himself well and practically versed in the spoken Tupi of to-day, who has issued a learned treatise to prove that “the Brazilian dialects present undoubtedly all the supposed characteristics of an agglutinative language, and belong to the same group as the numerous other dialects or tongues of America.”^[319] Dr. Cavalcanti does not, indeed, distinguish so clearly between agglutinative and incorporative languages as I should wish, but the trend of his work is altogether parallel to the arguments I am about to advance.

Fortunately, we do not suffer from a lack of materials to study the Tupi, ancient and modern. There are plenty of dictionaries, grammars and texts in it, and even an “Ollendorff’s Method,” for those who prefer that intellectual (!) system.^[320]

All recent writers agree that the modern Tupi has been materially changed by long contact with the whites. The traders and missionaries have exerted a disintegrating effect on its ancient forms, to some of which I shall have occasion to refer.

O Selvagem i Curso da Lingua Geral. By Dr. Couto de Magalhaes (Rio de Janeiro, 1876).

Turning our attention first to its synthetic character, one cannot but be surprised after reading Prof. Hartt’s opinion above quoted to find him a few pages later introducing us to the following example of “word-building of a more than usually polysynthetic character.”^[321]

Such examples, however, are not rare, as may be seen by turning over the leaves of Montoya’s Tesoro de la Lengua Guarani. The most noticeable and most American peculiarity of such compounds is that they are not collocations of words, as are the agglutinative compounds of the Ural-Altaic tongues, but of particles and phonetic elements which have no separate life in the language.

Father Montoya calls special attention to this in the first words of his Advertencia to his Tesoro. He says:—“The foundation of this language consists of particles which frequently have no meaning if taken alone; but when compounded with the whole or parts of others (for they cut them up a great deal in composition) they form significant expressions; for this reason there are no independent verbs in the language, as they are built up of these particles with nouns or pronouns. Thus, ÑemboÉ is composed of the three particles Ñe, mo, e. The Ñe is reciprocal; mo an active particle; e indicates skill; and the whole means ‘to exercise oneself,’ which we translate, ‘to learn,’ or ‘to teach,’ indeterminately; but with the personal sign added, anemboe, ‘I learn.’”

This analysis, which Montoya carries much further, reminds us forcibly of the extraordinarily acute analysis of the Cree (Algonkin) by Mr. James Howse.^[322] Undoubtedly the two tongues have been built up from significant particles (not words) in the same manner.

Some of these particles convey a peculiar turn to the whole sentence, difficult to express in our tongues. Thus the element É attached to the last syllable of a compound gives an oppositive sense to the whole expression; for example, ajur, “I come” simply; but if the question follows: “Who ordered you to come?” the answer might be, ajurÉ, “I come of my own accord; nobody ordered me.”^[323]

Cavalcanti observes that many of these formative elements which existed in the old Tupi have now fallen out of use.^[324] This is one of several evidences of a change in structure in the language, a loss of its more pliable and creative powers.

This synthesis is also displayed in the Tupi, as in the Cree, by the inseparable union of certain nouns with pronouns. The latter are constantly united with terms of consanguinity and generally with those of members of the body, the form of the noun undergoing material modifications. Thus:

Postpositions are in a similar manner sometimes merged into the nouns or pronouns which they limit. Thus: tenonde, before; guenonde, before him.

It appears to me that the substratum, the structural theory, of such a tongue is decidedly polysynthetic and not agglutinative, still less analytic.

Let us now inquire whether there are any signs of the incorporative process in Tupi.

We are at once struck with the peculiarity that there are two special sets of pronouns used with verbals, one set subjective, and the other objective, several of which cannot be employed in any other construction.^[325] This is almost diagnostic of the holophrastic method of speech. The pronouns in such cases are evidently regarded by the language-faculty as subordinate accessories to the verbal, and whether they are phonetically merged in it or not is a secondary question.

The Tupi pronouns (confining myself to the singular number for the sake of brevity) are as follows:

		Verbal affixes.
Independent personals.	Possessives.	Subject.	Object.
ixe or xe.	se or xe.	a.	xe.
inde or ne.	ne or re.	re, yepe.	oro.
ae or o.	ae or i.	o.	ae or i.

The verbal affixes are united to the theme with various phonetic changes, and so intimately as to form one word. The grammars give such example as:—

areco, I hold;	guereco, they hold him.
ahenoi, I call;	xerenoi, they call me.
ayaca, I dispute him;	oroaca, I dispute thee.

In the first person singular, the two pronominal forms xe and a are usually merged in the synthesis xa; as xamehen, I love.

Another feature pointing to the incorporative plan is the location of the object. The rule in the old language was to place the object in all instances before the verb, that is, between the verb and its subject when the latter was other than a personal suffix. Dr. Cavalcanti says that this is now in a measure changed, so that when the object is of the third person it is placed after the verb, although in the first and second persons the old rule still holds good.^[326] Thus the ancient Tupis would say:

boia	aÈ	o-sou,
snake	him	he-bites.

But in the modern tongue it is:

boia	o-sou	aÉ
snake	he-bites	him.

With the other persons the rule is still for the object to precede and to be attached to the theme:

Many highly complex verbal forms seem to me to illustrate a close incorporative tendency. Let us analyze for instance the word,

which means “him whom I teach” or “that which I teach.” Its theme is the verbal mboe, which in the extract I have above made from Montoya is shown to be a synthesis of the three elementary particles Ñe, mo, and e; xe is the possessive form of the personal pronoun, “my”; it is followed by the participial expression temi or tembi, which, according to Montoya, is equivalent to “illud quod facio;” its terminal vowel is syncopated with the relative y or i, “him, it”; so the separate parts of the expression are:—

I shall not pursue the examination of the Tupi further. It were, of course, easy to multiply examples. But I am willing to leave the case as it stands, and to ask linguists whether, in view of the above, it was not a premature judgment that pronounced it a tongue neither polysynthetic nor incorporative.

THE MUTSUN.

This is also one of the languages which has been announced as “neither polysynthetic nor incorporative,” and the construction of its verb as “simple to the last degree.”^[327]

We know the tongue only through the Grammar and Phrase-Book of Father de la Cuesta, who acknowledges himself to be very imperfectly acquainted with it.^[328] With its associated dialects, it was spoken near the site of the present city of San Francisco, California.

Looking first at the verb, its “extreme simplicity” is not so apparent as the statements about it would lead us to expect.

In the first place, the naked verbal theme undergoes a variety of changes by insertion and suffixes, like those of the Quiche and Qquichua, which modify its meaning. Thus:

Ara,	to give.
Arsa,	to give to many, or to give much.
Arapu,	to give to oneself.
Arasi,	to order to give, etc., etc.

Again:

Oio,	to catch.
OiÑi,	to come to catch.
Oimu,	to catch another, etc.

The author enumerates thirty-one forms thus derived from each verb, some conjugated like it, some irregularly. With regard to tenses, he gives eight preterits and four futures; and it cannot be said that they are formed simply by adding adverbs of time, as the theme itself takes a different form in several of them, aran, aras, aragts, etc. In the reflexive conjugation the pronoun follows the verb and is united with it: As,

where ca is a suffixed form of can, I; ne represents nenissia, oneself; the g is apparently a connective; and the theme is ara. This is quite in the order of the polysynthetic theory and is also incorporative.

Such syntheses are prominent in imperative forms. Thus from the above-mentioned verb, oio, to catch, we have,

in which mit is apparently the second person men, with a postposition tsa, mintsa; while yuts is a verbal fragment from yuyuts, which the author explains to mean “to set about,” or “to get done.” This imperative, therefore, is a verbal noun in synthesis with an interjection, “get done with thy gathering.” It is a marked case of polysynthesis. A number of such are found in the Mutsun phrases given, as:

In this compound cannis, is for can + huas, me + for; yuts is the imperative interjection for yuyuts; the remainder of the word is not clear. The phrase is given elsewhere

Without going further into this language, of which we know so little, it will be evident that it is very far from simple, and that it is certainly highly synthetic in various features.

CONCLUSIONS.

The conclusions to which the above study leads may be briefly summarized as follows:

1. The structural processes of incorporation and polysynthesis are much more influential elements in the morphology of language than has been conceded by some recent writers.

2. They are clearly apparent in a number of American languages where their presence has been heretofore denied.

3. Although so long as we are without the means of examining all American tongues, it will be premature to assert that these processes prevail in all, nevertheless it is safe to say that their absence has not been demonstrated in any of which we have sufficient and authentic material on which to base a decision.

4. The opinion of Duponceau and Humboldt, therefore, that these processes belong to the ground-plan of American languages, and are their leading characteristics, must still be regarded as a correct generalization.

[ADDENDUM.

Shortly after the above essay appeared in the Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, its arguments and conclusions were vigorously attacked by M. Lucien Adam in the Revue de Linguistique et de Philologie ComparÉe, Tome XIX (Paris, 1886). He begins by pointing out that examples of incorporation may be found in tongues of the Old World—which has never been denied (see above, pp. 353–4). Having acknowledged the incompleteness of his own definitions, he intimates that those I give are calculated rather to sustain my theory than to prove a linguistic trait. He then proceeds to lengthy and minute criticisms of the analyses I have made of the examples given under the several languages discussed. I am quite willing to concede that with the imperfect grammars and lexicons of these tongues so far published, I may have tripped at times in such analyses; but I am far from acknowledging that all those of M. Adam are correct, and I am quite certain that in some he is mistaken. The question, however, is one not possible to discuss in this place, and I must leave it; but I would refer the earnest student to the acute and learned article of M. Adam, which is much the most thorough yet written on the negative side of the debate.]

ArchÆologists tell us that the manufacturers of those rude stone implements called palÆoliths wandered up and down the world while a period of something like two hundred thousand years was unrolling its eventless centuries. Many believe that these early artisans had not the power of articulate expression to convey their emotions or ideas; if such they had, they were confined to inarticulate grunts and cries.

Haeckel proposed for the species at this period of its existence the designation Homo alalus, speechless man. Anatomists have come forward to show that the inferior maxillary bones disinterred in the caves of La Naulette and Schipka are so formed that their original possessors could not have had the power of articulation.^[330] But the latest investigators of this point have reached an opposite conclusion.^[331] We must, however, concede that the oral communication of men during that long epoch was of a very rudimentary character; it is contrary to every theory of intellectual evolution to suppose that they possessed a speech approaching anything near even the lowest organized of the linguistic stocks now in existence. By an attentive consideration of some of these lowest stocks, can we not form a somewhat correct conception of what was the character of the rudimentary utterances of the race? I think we can, but, as I believe I am the first to attempt such a picture, I offer it with becoming diffidence.

The physiological possibility that palÆolithic man possessed a language has, as I have said, been already vindicated; and that he was intellectually capable of speech could, I think, scarcely be denied by any one who will contemplate the conceptions of symmetry, the technical skill, and the wise adaptation to use, manifested in some of the oldest specimens of his art; as for example the axes disinterred from the ancient strata of San Isidro, near Madrid, those found forty feet deep in the post-glacial gravels near Trenton, New Jersey, or some of those figured by De Mortillet as derived from the beds of the Somme in France.^[332] We have evidence that at that period man made use of fire; that he raised shelters to protect himself from the weather; that he possessed some means of navigating the streams; that he could occasionally overcome powerful and ferocious beasts; that he already paid some attention to ornamenting his person; that he lived in communities; and that his migrations were extensive.^[333] In view of all this, is it not highly improbable that he was destitute of any vocal powers of expressing his plans and desires? I maintain that we should dismiss the Homo alalus, as a scientific romance which has served its time.

More than this, I believe that by a judicious study of existing languages, especially those which have suffered little by admixture or by distant removals, we can picture with reasonable fidelity the character of the earliest tongues spoken by man, the speech of the PalÆolithic Age.

This primitive utterance was, of course, not the same everywhere. It varied indefinitely. But for all that it is almost certain that in all localities it proceeded on analogous lines of development, just as languages have everywhere and at all times since. By studying simple and isolated languages, those which have suffered least by contact with others, or by alterations in conditions of culture, we can catch some glimpses of the character of man’s earliest significant expression, the “baby-talk of the race,” if I may use the expression. I have gleaned a certain number of such traits in the field of American linguistics, and present them to you as curiosities, which, like other curiosities, have considerable significance to those who will master their full purport.

The question I am about to consider, is, you will observe, quite different from that which concerns itself with the origin of linguistic stocks. Many of these unquestionably arose long after man had acquired well-developed languages, and when the cerebral convolutions whose activity is manifested in articulate expression had acquired a high grade of development through hereditary training. How such stocks may have arisen has been lucidly set forth by my learned friend Mr. Horatio Hale. He demonstrates by many examples that in the present cerebral evolution of man, infants develop an articulate language with the same natural facility that any other species of animal does the vocal utterances peculiar to its kind.^[334]

But in this essay I am contemplating man as he was before hundreds of generations of speaking ancestors had evolved such cerebral powers.

I begin with some observations on the phonetic elements. These are no other than what we call the alphabet, the simple sounds which combined together make up the words of a language. In all European tongues, the mere letters of the alphabet, by themselves, have no meaning and convey no idea; furthermore, their value in a word is fixed; and, thirdly, arranged in a word, they are sufficient to convey its sound and sense to one acquainted with their values.

Judged by certain American examples, all three of these seemingly fundamental characteristics of the phonetic elements were absent in primitive speech, and have become stable only by a long process of growth. We find tongues in which the primary sounds are themselves significant, and yet at the same time are highly variable; and we find many examples in which they are inadequate to convey the sense of the articulate sound.

As exemplifying these peculiarities I take the TinnÉ or Athapascan, spoken widely in British America, and of which the Apache and Navaho in the United States are branches. You know that in English the vowels A, E, I, O, U, and the consonants, as such, F, S, K, and the others, convey to your mind no meaning, are not attached to any idea or train of ideas. This is altogether different in the TinnÉ. We are informed by Bishop Faraud,^[335] a thorough master of that tongue, that its significant radicals are the five primitive vowel sounds, A, E, I, O, U. Of these A expresses matter, E existence, I force or energy, O existence doubtful, and U existence absent, non-existence, negation or succession. These vowels are “put in action,” as he phrases it, by single or double consonants, “which have more or less value in proportion as the vowel is more or less strong.” These consonantal sounds, as we learn at length from the works on this language by Father Petitot, are also materially significant. They are numerous, being sixty-three in all, and are divided into nine different classes, each of which conveys a series of related or associated ideas in the native mind.

Thus, the labials express the ideas of time and space, as age, length, distance, and also whiteness, the last mentioned, perhaps, through association with the white hair of age, or the endless snowfields of their winter. The dentals express all that relates to force terminating, hence uselessness, inanity, privation, smallness, feebleness; and also greatness, elevation, the motor power. The nasals convey the general notion of motion in repetition; hence, rotation, reduplication, gravitation, and, by a singularly logical association, organic life. The gutturals indicate motion in curves; hence, sinuousness, flexibility, ebullition, roundness, and by a linear figure different from that which underlies the Latin rectitudo, justness, correctness. The H, either as an aspirate or an hiatus, introduces the ideas of command and subjection, elevation and prostration, and the like.^[336]

You will observe that in some of these cases the signification of a sound includes both a notion and its opposite, as greatness and smallness. This is an interesting feature, to which I shall refer later.

Turn now to another language, the Cree. Geographically it is contiguous to the TinnÉ; but, says Bishop Faraud, who spoke them both fluently, they resemble each other no more than the French does the Chinese. Nevertheless, we discover this same peculiarity of materially significant phonetic elements. Howse, in his Cree Grammar, observes that the guttural K and the labial W constitute the essential part of all intensive terms in that language, “whether the same be attributive, formative, or personal accident.” Indeed, he maintains that the articulate sounds of the Cree all express relative powers, feebleness or force, independent of their position with reference to other sounds.

You may inquire whether in the different groups of American tongues the same or a similar signification is attached to any one sound, or to the sounds of any one organ. If it were so, it would give countenance to those theories which maintain that there is some fixed relation between sound and sense in the radicals of languages. I must reply that I have found very little evidence for this theory; and yet some. For example, the N sound expresses the notion of the ego, of myself-ness, in a great many tongues, far apart geographically and linguistically. It is found at the basis of the personal pronoun of the first person and of the words for man in numerous dialects in North and South America. Again, the K sound is almost as widely associated with the ideas of otherness, and is at the base of the personal pronoun of the second person singular and of the expressions for superhuman personalities, the divine existence.^[337] It is essentially demonstrative in its power.

Again, in a long array of tongues in various parts of the world, the subjective relation is expressed by the M sound, as has been pointed out by Dr. Winkler; and other examples could be added. Many of these it is impossible to attribute to derivation from a common source. Some writers maintain that sounds have a subjective and fixed relation to ideas; others call such coincidences “blind chance,” but these should remember that chance itself means merely the action of laws not yet discovered.

You might suppose that this distinction, I mean that between self and other, between I, thou and he, is fundamental, that speech could not proceed without it. You would be mistaken. American languages furnish conclusive evidence that for unnumbered generations mankind got along well enough without any such discrimination. One and the same monosyllable served for all three persons and both numbers. The meaning of this monosyllable was undoubtedly “any living human being.” Only after a long time did it become differentiated by the addition of locative particles into the notions, “I—living human being,” “Thou—living human being,” “He—living human being,” and so on. Even a language spoken by so cultured a people as the ancient Peruvians bears unmistakable traces of this process, as has been shown by Von Tschudi in his admirable analysis of that tongue; and the language of the Baures of Bolivia still presents examples of verbs conjugated without pronouns or pronominal affixes.^[338]

The extraordinary development of the pronouns in many American languages—some have as many as eighteen different forms, as the person is contemplated as standing, lying, in motion, at rest, alone, in company, etc., etc.—this multiplicity of forms, I say, is proof to the scientific linguist that these tongues have but recently developed this grammatical category. Wherever we find overgrowth, the soil is new and the crop rank.

In spite of the significance attached to the phonetic elements, they are, in many American languages, singularly vague and fluctuating. If in English we were to pronounce three words, loll, nor, roll, indifferently as one or the other, you see what violence we should do to the theory of our alphabet. Yet analogous examples are constant in many American languages. Their consonants are “alternating,” in large groups, their vowels “permutable.” M. Petitot calls this phenomenon “literal affinity,” and shows that in the TinnÉ it takes place not only between consonants of the same group, the labials for instance, but of different groups, as labials with dentals, and dentals with nasals. These differences are not merely dialectic; they are found in the same village, the same family, the same person. They are not peculiar to the TinnÉ; they recur in the Klamath. Dr. Behrendt was puzzled with them in the Chapanec. “No other language,” he writes, “has left me in such doubt as this one. The same person pronounces the same word differently; and when his attention is called to it, will insist that it is the same. Thus, for devil he will give Tixambi and Sisaimbui; for hell, Nakupaju and Nakapoti.”^[339] Speaking of the Guarani, Father Montoya says: “There is in this language a constant changing of the letters, for which no sufficient rules can be given.”^[340] And Dr. Darapsky in his recently published study of the Araucanian of Chile gives the following equation of permutable letters in that tongue:

The laws of the conversion of sounds of the one organ into those of another have not yet been discovered; but the above examples, which are by no means isolated ones, serve to admonish us that the phonetic elements of primitive speech probably had no fixedness.

There is another oddity about some of these consonantal sounds which I may notice in passing. Some of them are not true elementary sounds; they cannot stand alone, but must always have another consonant associated with them. Thus, the labial B is common in Guarani; but it must always be preceded by an M. In Nahuatl the liquid L is frequent; but it is the initial of no word in that language. The Nahuas apparently could not pronounce it, unless some other articulate sound preceded it.

Albornoz, in his Grammar of the Chapanec Tongue,^[342] states that the natives cannot pronounce an initial B, G, Y, or D, without uttering an N sound before it.

The third point in the phonology of these tongues to which I alluded is the frequency with which the phonetic elements, as graphically expressed, are inadequate to convey the idea. I may quote a remark by Howse in his Cree Grammar, which is true probably of all primitive speech, “Emphasis, accent and modifications of vocal expression; which are inadequately expressed in writing, seem to constitute an essential, perhaps the vital part of Indian language.” In such modifications I include tone, accent, stress, vocal inflection, quantity and pause. These are with much difficulty or not at all includable in a graphic method, and yet are frequently significant. Take the pause or hiatus. I have already mentioned that in TinnÉ it correlates a whole series of ideas. M. Belcourt, in his Grammar of the Sauteux, an Algonkin dialect, states that the pause may completely change the meaning of a word and place it in another class; it is also essential in that language in the formation of the tenses.^[343] This is the case in the Guarani of South America. Montoya illustrates it by the example: Peru o’u, Peter ate it; but Peru ou, Peter came; quite another thing, you will observe.^[344]

The stress laid on a vowel-sound often alters its meaning. In the Sauteux, Belcourt points out that this constitutes the only distinction between the first and second persons in participles. In the Nahuatl this alone distinguishes many plural forms from their singulars; and many similar examples could be cited.

With difficulties of this nature to encounter, a person accustomed to the definite phonology of European tongues is naturally at a loss. The Spanish scholar Uricoechea expresses this in relating his efforts to learn the Chibcha of New Granada, a tongue also characterized by these fluctuating phonetics. He visited the region where it is still spoken with a grammar and phrase-book in his hand, and found to his disappointment that they could not understand one word he said. He then employed a native who spoke Spanish, and with him practiced some phrases until he believed he had them perfect. Another disappointment—not one of them was understood. He returned to his teacher and again repeated them; but what was his dismay when not even his teacher recognized a single word! After that Uricoechea gave up the attempt.^[345]

Leaving now the domain of phonology and turning to that of lexicography, I will point out to you a very curious phenomenon in primitive speech. I have already alluded to it in quoting M. Petitot’s remark that in TinnÉ a sound often means both a notion and its opposite; that, for instance, the same word may express good and bad, and another both high and low. To use M. Petitot’s own words, “a certain number of consonants have the power of expressing a given order of ideas or things, and also the contradictory of this order.” In TinnÉ, a great many words for opposite ideas are the same or nearly the same, derived from the same significant elements. Thus, son good, sona bad; tezo, sweet, tezon bitter; ya immense, ya very small; inla one time, inlasin every time; and so on.

This union of opposite significations reappears in the ultimate radicals of the Cree language. These, says Mr. Howse,^[346] whose Grammar I again quote, express Being in its positive and negative modes: “These opposite modes are expressed by modifications of the same element, furnishing two classes of terms widely different from each other in signification.” In Cree the leading substantive radical is eth, which originally meant both Being and Not-Being. In the present language eth remains as the current positive, ith as the current privative. It means within, ut without; and like parallelisms run through many expressions, indicating that numerous series of opposite ideas are developments from the same original sounds.

I have found a number of such examples in the Nahuatl of Mexico, and I am persuaded that they are very usual in American tongues. Dr. Carl Abel has pointed out many in the ancient Coptic, and I doubt not they were characteristic of all primitive speech.

To explain their presence we must reflect on the nature of the human mind, and the ascertained laws of thought. One of these fundamental and necessary laws of thought, that usually called the second, was expressed by the older logicians in the phrase Omnis determinatio est negatio, and by their modern followers in the formula, “A is not not-A;” in other words, a quality, an idea, an element of knowledge, can rise into cognition only by being limited by that which it is not. That by which it is limited is known in logic as its privative. In a work published some years ago I pointed out that this privative is not an independent thought, as some have maintained, but that the positive and its privative are really two aspects of the same thought.^[347] This highly important distinction explains how in primitive speech, before the idea had risen into clear cognition, both it and its privative were expressed by the same sound; and when it did rise into such cognition, and then into expression, the original unity is exhibited by the identity of the radical. Thus it happens that from such an unexpected quarter as an analysis of Cree grammar do we obtain a confirmation of the starting point of the logic of Hegel in his proposition that the identity of the Being and the Not-being is the ultimate equation of thought.

The gradual development of grammar is strikingly illustrated in these languages. Their most prominent trait is what is called incorporation. Subject, verb, direct object and remote object, are all expressed in one word. Some have claimed that there are American languages of which this is not true; but I think I have shown in an essay published some time ago,^[348] that this opinion arises from our insufficient knowledge of the alleged exceptions. At any rate, this incorporation was undoubtedly a trait of primitive speech in America and elsewhere. Primitive man, said Herder, was like a baby; he wanted to say all at once. He condensed his whole sentence into a single word. Archdeacon Hunter, in his Lecture on the Cree Language, gives as an example the scriptural phrase, “I shall have you for my disciples,” which, in that tongue, is expressed by one word.^[349]

So far as I have been able to analyze these primitive sentence-words, they always express being in relation; and hence they partake of the nature of verbs rather than nouns. In this conclusion I am obliged to differ with the eminent linguist Professor Steinthal, who, in his profound exposition of the relations of psychology to grammar, maintains that while the primitive sentence was a single word, that word was a noun, a name.^[350]

It is evident that the primitive man did not connect his sentences. One followed the other disjointedly, unconnectedly. This is so plainly marked in American tongues that the machinery for connecting sentences is absent. This machinery consists properly of the relative pronoun and the conjunction. You will be surprised to hear that there is no American language, none that I know, which possesses either of these parts of speech. That which does duty for the conjunction in the Maya and Nahuatl, for instance, is a noun meaning associate or companion, with a prefixed possessive.^[351]

Equally foreign to primitive speech was any expression of time in connection with verbal forms; in other words, there was no such thing as tenses. We are so accustomed to link actions to time, past, present, or future, that it is a little difficult to understand how this accessory can be omitted in intelligible discourse. It is perfectly evident, however, from the study of many American tongues, that at one period of their growth they possessed for a long interval only one tense, which served indifferently for past, present, and future;^[352] and even yet most of them form the past and future by purely material means, as the addition of an adverb of time, by accent, quantity or repetition, and in others the tense relation is still unknown.^[353]

In some tongues, the Omagua of the upper Orinoco for example, there is no sort of connection between the verbal stem and its signs of tense, mode or person. They have not even any fixed order. In such languages there is no difference in sound between the words for “I marry,” and “my wife;” “I eat,” and “my food;” between “Paul dies,” “Paul died,” “Paul will die,” and “Paul is dead.”^[354] Through such tongues we can distinctly perceive a time when the verb had neither tense, mode, nor person; when it was not even a verb nor yet a verbal, but an epicene sound which could be adapted to any service of speech.

It is also evident that things were not thought of, or talked of, out of their natural relations. There are still in most American tongues large classes of words, such as the parts of the body and terms of kinship, which cannot stand alone. They must always be accompanied by a pronoun expressing relation.

Few American tongues have any adjectives, the Cree, for instance, not a dozen in all. Prepositions are equally rare, and articles are not found. These facts testify that what are called “the grammatical categories” were wholly absent in the primitive speech of man.

So also were those adjectives which are called numerals. There are American tongues which have no words for any numerals whatever. The numerical concepts one, two, three, four, cannot be expressed in these languages for lack of terms with any such meaning.^[355] This was a great puzzle to the missionaries when they undertook to expound to their flocks the doctrine of the Trinity. They were in worse case even than the missionary to an Oregon tribe, who, to convey the notion of soul to his hearers, could find no word in their language nearer to it than one which meant “the lower gut.”

A very interesting chapter in the study of these tongues is that which reveals the evolution of specific distinctions, those inductive generalizations under which primitive man classified the objects of the universe about him. These distinctions were either grammatical or logical, that is, either formal or material. That most widely seen in America is a division of all existence into those which are considered living and those considered not living. This constitutes the second great generalization of the primitive mind, the first, as I have said, having been that into Being and Not-being. The distinctions of Living and Not-living gave rise to the animate and inanimate conjugations. A grammatical sex distinction, which is the prevailing one in the grammars of the Aryan tongues, does not exist in any American dialect known to me.^[356]

It is true that abstract general terms are absent or rare in the most primitive tongues. On the other hand, we find in them a great many classificatory particles. These correspond only remotely to anything known in Aryan speech, and seem far more abstract than generic nouns. I will illustrate what they are by an example taken from the Hidatsa, a dialect of the Dakota.

The word for sled in that dialect is midu-maidutsada. The first part of this compound, midu, means anything of wood or into which wood enters. Fire is midÉ because it is kept up with wood. With the phonetic laxity which I have before noted, the first syllable mi may as correctly be pronounced bi or wi. It is a common nominal prefix, of vague significance, but seems to classify objects as distinctives. Ma designates objects whose immediate use is not expressed; i denotes instrument or material; du, conveys that the cause of the action is not specified; tsa intimates the action is that of separating; da, that this is done quickly (tsa-da, to slide).^[357]

Thus by the juxtaposition of one classificatory particle after another, seven in number, all of them logical universals, the savage makes up the name of the specific object.

This system was probably the first adopted by man when he began to set in order his perceptions within the categories of his understanding, with the aim of giving them vocal expression. It is a plan which we find most highly developed in the rudest languages, and therefore we may reasonably believe that it characterized prehistoric speech.

The question has been put by psychological grammarians, which one of the senses most helped man in the creation of language—or to express it in modern scientific parlance, was primitive man a visuaire or an auditaire? Did he model his sounds after what he heard, or what he saw? The former opinion has been the more popular, and has given rise to the imitative or “onomatopoetic” theory of language. No doubt there is a certain degree of truth in this, but the analysis of American tongues leans decidedly toward classing primitive man among the visuaires. His earliest significant sounds seem to have been expressive of motion and rest, energy and its absence, space and direction, color and form, and the like. A different opinion has been maintained by Darwin and by many who have studied the problems presented by the origin of words from a merely physical or physiological standpoint, but a careful investigation shows that it was the sense of sight rather than of hearing which was the prompter to vocal utterance. But the consideration of the source of primitive significant sounds lies without the bounds of my present study.

It will be seen from these remarks that the primitive speech of man was far more rudimentary than any language known to us. It had no grammatical form; so fluctuating were its phonetics, and so much depended on gesture, tone, and stress, that its words could not have been reduced to writing, nor arranged in alphabetic sequence; these words often signified logical contradictories, and which of the antithetic meanings was intended could be guessed only from the accent or sign; it possessed no prepositions nor conjunctions, no numerals, no pronouns of any kind, no forms to express singular or plural, male or female, past or present; the different vowel-sounds and the different consonantal groups conveyed specific significance, and were of more import than the syllables which they formed. The concept of time came much later than that of space, and for a long while was absent.

“The words which denote love, describing a sentiment at once powerful and delicate, reveal the inmost heart of those who created them. The vital importance attached to this sentiment renders these beautiful words especially adapted to point out the exceeding value of language as a true autobiography of nations.”

This quotation is from an essay by a thoughtful writer, Dr. Carl Abel, in which he has gathered from four languages, the Latin, English, Hebrew and Russian, their expressions for this sweet emotion, and subjected them to a careful analysis.^[359] The perusal of his article has led me to make some similar examinations of American languages; but with this difference in method, that while Dr. Abel takes the languages named in the fullness of their development and does not occupy himself with the genesis of the terms of affection, I shall give more particular attention to their history and derivation as furnishing illustrations of the origin and growth of those altruistic sentiments which are revealed in their strongest expression in the emotions of friendship and love.

Upon these sentiments are based those acts which unite man to man in amicable fellowship and mutual interchange of kindly offices, thus creating a nobler social compact than that which rests merely on increased power of defence or aggression. These sentiments are those which bind parent to child and child to parent, and thus supply the foundation upon which the family in the true significance of the term should rest. These are they which, directed toward the ruler or the state, find expression in personal loyalty and patriotic devotion. Surpassing all in fervor and potency, these sentiments, when exhibited in love between the sexes, direct the greater part of the activity of each individual life, mould the forms of the social relations, and control the perpetuation of the species. Finally, in their last and highest manifestations, these sentiments are those which have suggested to the purest and clearest intellects both the most exalted intellectual condition of man, and the most sublime definition of divinity.^[360] These are good reasons, therefore, why we should scan with more than usual closeness the terms for the conception of love in the languages of nations.

Another purpose which I shall have in view will be to illustrate by these words the wonderful parallelism which everywhere presents itself in the operations of the human mind, and to show how it is governed by the same associations of ideas both in the new and the old worlds.

As a preparation for the latter object, let us take a glance at the derivation of the principal words expressing love in the Aryan languages. The most prominent of them may be traced back to one of two ruling ideas, the one intimating a similarity or likeness between the persons loving, the other a wish or desire. The former conveys the notion that the feeling is mutual, the latter that it is stronger on one side than on the other.

These diverse origins are well illustrated by the French aimer and the English love. Aimer, from the Latin amare, brings us to the Greek aa, ???, both of which spring from the Sanscrit som; from which in turn the Germans get their words sammt, along with, and zusammen, together; while we obtain from this root almost without change our words similar and same. Etymologically, therefore, those who love are alike; they are the same in such respects that they are attracted to one another, on the proverbial principle that “birds of a feather flock together.”

Now turning to the word love, German liebe, Russian lubov, lubity, we find that it leads us quite a different road. It is traced back without any material change to the Sanscrit lobha, covetousness, the ancient Coptic ??e, to want, to desire. In this origin we see the passion portrayed as a yearning to possess the loved object; and in the higher sense to enjoy the presence and sympathy of the beloved, to hold sweet communion with him or her.

A class of ideas closely akin to this are conveyed in such words as “attached to,” “attraction,” “affection,” and the like, which make use of the figure of speech that the lover is fastened to, drawn toward, or bound up with the beloved object. We often express this metaphor in full in such phrases as “the bonds of friendship,” etc.

This third class of words, although in the history of language they are frequently of later growth than the two former, probably express the sentiment which underlies both these, and that is a dim, unconscious sense of the unity which is revealed to man most perfectly in the purest and highest love, which at its sublimest height does away with the antagonism of independent personality, and blends the I and the thou in a oneness of existence.

Although in this, its completest expression, we must seek examples solely between persons of opposite sex, it will be well to consider in an examination like the present the love between men, which is called friendship, that between parents and children, and that toward the gods, the givers of all good things. The words conveying such sentiments will illustrate many features of the religious and social life of the nations using them.

I. The Algonkin.

I begin with this group of dialects, once widely spread throughout the St. Lawrence valley and the regions adjoining; and among them I select especially the Cree and the Chipeway, partly because we know more about them, and partly because they probably represent the common tongue in its oldest and purest type. They are closely allied, the same roots appearing in both with slight phonetic variations.

In both of them the ordinary words for love and friendship are derived from the same monosyllabic root, sak. On this, according to the inflectional laws of the dialects, are built up the terms for the love of man to woman, a lover, love in the abstract, friend, friendship, and the like. It is also occasionally used by the missionaries for the love of man to God and of God to man.^[361]

In the Chipeway this root has but one form, sagi; but in Cree it has two, a weak and a strong form, saki and sakk. The meaning of the latter is more particularly to fasten to, to attach to. From it are derived the words for string or cord, the verbs “to tie,” “to fasten,” etc.; and also some of the coarsest words to express the sexual relation.^[362] Both these roots are traced back to the primary element of the Algonkin language expressed by the letters sak or s—k. This conveys the generic notion of force or power exerted by one over another,^[363] and is apparently precisely identical with the fundamental meaning of the Latin afficio, “to affect one in some manner by active agency,”^[364] from which word, I need hardly add, were derived affectus and affectio and our “affection;” thus we at once meet with an absolute parallelism in the working of the Aryan Italic and the American Algonkin mind.

The Cree has several words which are confined to parental and filial love and that which the gods have for men. These are built up on the disyllabic radical espi or aspi, which is an instrumental particle signifying “by means of, with the aid of.”^[365] Toward the gods, such words refer to those who aid us; toward children those whom their parents aid; and from children toward parents, again, those from whom aid is received.

For love between men, friendship, the Cree employs some words from the radical sÂki; but more frequently those compounded with the root wit or witch, which means “in company with,”^[366] and is the precise analogue of the syllable com (Latin, con) in the English words companion, comrade, compeer, confederate, etc.; it conveys the idea of association in life and action, and that association a voluntary and pleasure-giving one.

In the Chipeway there is a series of expressions for family love and friendship which in their origin carry us back to the same psychological process which developed the Latin amare from the Sanscrit sam (see above). They may be illustrated by the melodious term, which in that dialect means both friendship and relationship, inawendawin. This is an abstract verbal noun from the theme ni inawa, I resemble him, which is built up from the radicle in. This particle denotes a certain prevailing way or manner, and appears both in Cree and Chipeway in a variety of words.^[367] The principle of similarity is thus fully expressed as the basis of friendship. To see how apparent this is we have but to remember the English, “I like him,” i. e., there is something in him like me.

The feebler sentiment of merely liking a person or thing is expressed in the Chipeway by a derivative from the adjective mino, good, well, and signifies that he or it seems good to me.^[368]

The highest form of love, however, that which embraces all men and all beings, that whose conception is conveyed in the Greek ???p?, we find expressed in both the dialects by derivation from a root different from any I have mentioned. It is in its dialectic forms kis, keche, or kiji, and in its origin it is an intensive interjectional expression of pleasure, indicative of what gives joy.^[369] Concretely it signifies what is completed, permanent, powerful, perfected, perfect. As friendship and love yield the most exalted pleasure, from this root the natives drew a fund of words to express fondness, attachment, hospitality, charity; and from the same worthy source they selected that adjective which they applied to the greatest and most benevolent divinity.^[370]

The Nahuatl, Mexican or Aztec language was spoken extensively throughout Mexico and Central America, and every tribe who used it could boast of a degree of culture considerably above that of any of the Algonkin communities. Such being the case, it is rather surprising to note how extremely poor in comparison is the Nahuatl in independent radicals denoting love or affection. In fact, there is only one word in the language which positively has this signification, and it, with its derivatives, is called upon to express every variety of love, human and divine, carnal and chaste, between men and between the sexes, and by human beings toward inanimate things.

This word is tlazÓtla, he loves. It is no easy matter to trace its history. By well known laws of Nahuatl etymology we know that the root is zo. We have from this same root several other words of curiously diverse meanings. Thus, izo, to bleed, to draw blood, either for health, or, as was the custom of those nations, as a sacrifice before idols; izolini, to grow old, to wear out, applied to garments; tlazoti, to offer for sale at a high price; and zozo, to string together, as the natives did flowers, peppers, beads, etc. Now, what idea served as the common starting-point of all these expressions? The answer is that we find it in the word zo as applied to a sharp-pointed instrument, a thorn, or a bone or stone awl, used in the earliest times for puncturing or transfixing objects. From this came zozo, to transfix with such an instrument, and string on a cord; izoliui, to be full of holes, as if repeatedly punctured, and thus worn out; and izo, to bleed, because that was done by puncturing the flesh with the thorns of the maguey or sharp obsidian points.^[371]

But how do we bring these into connection with the sentiment of love and its verbal expression? We might indeed seek an illustration of the transfer from classical mythology, and adduce the keen-pointed arrows of Cupid, the darts of love, as pointing out the connection. But I fear this would be crediting the ancient Nahuas with finer feelings than they deserve. I gravely doubt that they felt the shafts of the tender passion with any such susceptibility as to employ this metaphor. Much more likely is it that tlazÓtla, to love, is derived directly from the noun tlazÓtl, which means something strung with or fastened to another. This brings us directly back to the sense of “attached to” in English, and to that of the root saki in Algonkin, the idea of being bound to another by ties of emotion and affection.

But there is one feature in this derivation which tells seriously against the national psychology of the Nahuas; this, their only word for love, is not derived, as is the Algonkin, from the primary meaning of the root, but from a secondary and later signification. This hints ominously at the probability that the ancient tongue had for a long time no word at all to express this, the highest and noblest emotion of the human heart, and that consequently this emotion itself had not risen to consciousness in the national mind.

But the omissions of the fathers were more than atoned for by the efforts of their children. I know no more instructive instance in the history of language to illustrate how original defects are amended in periods of higher culture by the linguistic faculty, than this precise point in the genesis of the Nahuatl tongue. The Nahuas, when they approached the upper levels of emotional development, found their tongue singularly poor in radicals conveying such conceptions. As the literal and material portions of their speech offered them such inadequate means of expression, they turned toward its tropical and formal portions, and in those realms reached a degree of development in this direction which far surpasses that in any other language known to me.

In the formal portion of the language they were not satisfied with one, but adopted a variety of devices to this end. Thus: all verbs expressing emotion may have an intensive termination suffixed, imparting to them additional force; again, certain prefixes indicating civility, respect and affection may be employed in the imperative and optative moods; again, a higher synthetic construction may be employed in the sentence, by which the idea expressed is emphasized, a device in constant use in their poetry; and especially the strength of emotion is indicated by suffixing a series of terminations expressing contempt, reverence or love. The latter are wonderfully characteristic of Nahuatl speech. They are not confined to verbs and nouns, but may be added to adjectives, pronouns, participles, and even to adverbs and postpositions. Thus every word in the sentence is made to carry its burden of affection to the ear of the beloved object!

Add to these facilities the remarkable power of the Nahuatl to impart tropical and figurative senses to words by the employment of rhetorical resources, and to present them as one idea by means of the peculiarities of its construction, and we shall not consider as overdrawn the expression of Professor De la Rosa when he writes: “There can be no question but that in the manifestation in words of the various emotions, the Nahuatl finds no rival, not only among the languages of modern Europe, but in the Greek itself.”^[372]

The Nahuatl word for friendship is icniuhtli. This is a compound of the preposition ic, with; the noun-ending tli; and the adverbial yuh, or noyuh, which means “of the same kind.” The word, therefore, has the same fundamental conception as the Latin amicus and the Cree inawema, but it was not developed into a verbal to express the suffering of the passion itself.^[373]

III. The Maya.

The whole peninsula of Yucatan was inhabited by the Mayas, and tribes speaking related dialects of their tongue lived in Guatemala, Chipapas, and on the Gulf Shore north of Vera Cruz. All these depended chiefly on agriculture for subsistence, were builders of stone houses, and made use of a system of written records. Their tongue, therefore, deserves special consideration as that of a nation with strong natural tendencies to development.

In turning to the word for love in the Maya vocabulary, we are at once struck with the presence of a connected series of words expressing this emotion, while at the same time they, or others closely akin to them and from the same root, mean pain, injury, difficulty, suffering, wounds and misery. Both are formed by the usual rules from the monosyllable ya.^[374]

Were the ancient Mayas so sensitive to love’s wounds and the pangs of passion as to derive their very words for suffering from the name of this sentiment?

No; that solution is too unlikely for our acceptance. More probable is it that we have here an illustration of the development of language from interjectional cries. In fact, we may be said to have the proof of it, for we discover that this monosyllable ya is still retained in the language as a verb, with the signification “to feel anything deeply, whether as a pain or as a pleasure.”^[375] Its derivatives were developed with both meanings, and as love and friendship are the highest forms of pleasure, the word ya in its happier senses became confined to them.

It seems to have sufficed to express the conception in all its forms, for the writers in the language apply it to the love of the sexes, to that between parents and children, that among friends, also to that which men feel toward God, and that which He is asserted to feel toward men.^[376]

The Mayas, therefore, were superior to the Nahuas in possessing a radical word which expressed the joy of love; and they must be placed above even the early Aryans in that this radical was in significance purely psychical, referring strictly to a mental state, and neither to similarity nor desire.

It is noteworthy that this interjectional root, although belonging to the substructure of the language, does not appear with the meaning of love in the dialects of the Maya stock. In them the words for this sentiment are derived from other roots.

Thus among the Huastecas, residing on the Gulf of Mexico, north of Vera Cruz, the word for love is canezal. It is employed for both human and divine love, and also means anything precious and to be carefully guarded as of advantage to the possessor.^[377] There is no difficulty in following its development when we turn to the Maya, which preserves the most numerous ancient forms and meanings of any dialect of this stock. In it we discover that the verb can means “to affect another in some way, to give another either by physical contact or example a virtue, vice, disease or attribute.”^[378] Here again we come upon the precise correlative of the Latin afficio, from which proceeds our “affection,” etc.

The Guatemalan tribes, the principal of which were and are the Quiches and Cakchiquels, did not accept either ya or can as the root from which to build their expressions for the sentiment of love. In both these dialects the word for to love is logoh. It also means “to buy,” and this has led a recent writer to hold up to ridicule the Spanish missionaries who chose this word to express both human and divine love. Dr. Stoll, the writer referred to, intimates that it had no other meaning than “to buy” in the pure original tongue, and that the only word for the passion is ah, to want, to desire.^[379] In this he does not display his usual accuracy, for we find logoh used in the sense “to like,” “to love,” in the Annals of the Cakchiquels, written by a native who had grown to manhood before the Spaniards first entered his country.^[380]

That the verb logoh means, both in origin and later use, “to buy,” as well as “to love,” is undoubtedly true. Its root logh is identical with the Maya loh, which has the meanings “to exchange, to buy, to redeem, to emancipate.” It was the word selected by the Franciscan missionaries to express the redemption of the world by Christ, and was applied to the redemption of captives and slaves. It might be suggested that it bears a reference to “marriage by purchase;” but I think that “to buy,” and “to love,” may be construed as developments of the same idea of prizing highly. When we say that a person is appreciated, we really say that he has had a proper price put upon him. The Latin carus, which Cicero calls ipsum verbum amoris,^[381] means costly in price as well as beloved; and the tender English “dear” means quite as often that the object is expensive to buy, as that we dote very much upon it. Nor need we go outside of American languages for illustrations; in Nahuatl tlazÓti means to offer for sale at a high price; and in Huasteca canel, from the same root as canezal, to love, means something precious in a pecuniary sense, as well as an object of the affections. Other instances will present themselves when we come to examine some of the South American tongues. But from what I have already given, it is evident that there is nothing contradictory in the double meaning of the verb logoh.

IV. The Qquichua.

The ancient Peruvians who spoke the Qquichua language had organized a system of government and a complex social fabric unsurpassed by any on the continent. The numerous specimens of their arts which have been preserved testify strongly to the licentiousness of their manners, standing in this respect in marked contrast to the Aztecs, whose art was pure. It must be regarded as distinctly in connection with this that we find a similar contrast in their languages. We have seen that in the Nahuatl there appears to have been no word with a primary signification “to love” or any such conception. The Qquichua, on the contrary, is probably the richest language on the continent, not only in separate words denoting affection, but in modifications of these by imparting to them delicate shades of meaning through the addition of particles. As an evidence of the latter, it is enough to cite the fact that Dr. Anchorena, in his grammar of the tongue, sets forth nearly six hundred combinations of the word munay, to love!^[382]

The Qquichua is fortunate in other respects; it has some literature of its own, and its structure has been carefully studied by competent scholars; it is possible, therefore, to examine its locutions in a more satisfactory manner than is the case with most American languages. Its most celebrated literary monument is the drama of Ollanta, supposed to have been composed about the time of the conquest. It has been repeatedly edited and translated, most accurately by Pacheco Zegarra.^[383] His text may be considered as the standard of the pure ancient tongue.

Of Qquichua words for the affections, that in widest use is the one above quoted, munay. It is as universal in its application as its English equivalent, being applied to filial and parental love as well as to that of the sexes, to affection between persons of the same sex, and to the love of God. No other word of the class has such a wide significance. It ranges from an expression of the warmest emotion down to that faint announcement of a preference which is conveyed in the English, “I should prefer.”^[384]

On looking for its earlier and concrete sense, we find that munay expressed merely a sense of want, an appetite and the accompanying desire of satisfying it, hence the will, or the wish, not subjectively, but in the objective manifestation.^[385] Therefore it is in origin nearly equivalent to the earliest meaning of “love,” as seen in the Sanscrit and the Coptic.

While munay is thus to love on reasonable grounds and with definite purpose, blind, unreasoning, absorbing passion is expressed by huaylluni. This is nearly always confined to sexual love, and conveys the idea of the sentiment showing itself in action by those sweet signs and marks of devotion which are so highly prized by the loving heart. The origin of this word indicates its sentient and spontaneous character. Its radical is the interjection huay, which among that people is an inarticulate cry of tenderness and affection.^[386]

The verb lluylluy means literally to be tender or soft, as fruit, or the young of animals; and applied to the sentiments, to love with tenderness, to have as a darling, to caress lovingly. It has less of sexuality in it than the word last mentioned, and is applied by girls to each other, and as a term of family fondness. It is on a parallel with the English “dear,” “to hold dear,” etc.^[387]

In the later compositions in Qquichua the favorite word for love is ccuyay. Originally this expression meant to pity, and in this sense it occurs in the drama of Ollanta; but also even there as a term signifying the passion of love apart from any idea of compassion.^[388] In the later songs, those whose composition may be placed in this century, it is preferred to munay as the most appropriate term for the love between the sexes.^[389] From it also is derived the word for charity and benevolence.

As munay is considered to refer to natural affection felt within the mind, mayhuay is that ostentatious sentiment which displays itself in words of tenderness and acts of endearment, but leaves it an open question whether these are anything more than simulated signs of emotion.^[390]

This list is not exhaustive of the tender words in the Qquichua; but it will serve to show that the tongue was rich in them, and that the ancient Peruvians recognized many degrees and forms of this moving sentiment.

What is also noteworthy is the presence in this language of the most philosophical term for friendship in its widest sense that can be quoted from any American language. It is runaccuyay, compounded of ccuyani, mentioned above, and runa, man—the love of mankind. This compound, however, does not occur in the Ollanta drama, and it may have been manufactured by the missionaries. The usual term is maciy, which means merely “associate,” or kochomaciy, a table-companion or convive.

V. The Tupi-Guarani.

The linguistic stock which has the widest extension in South America is that which is represented in Southern Brazil by the Guarani, and in Central and Northern by the Tupi or Lingoa Geral. The latter is spoken along the Amazon and its tributaries for a distance of twenty-five hundred miles. It is by no means identical with the Guarani, but the near relationship of the two is unmistakable. The Guarani presents the simpler and more primitive forms, and may be held to present the more archaic type.

The word for love in the Guarani is aihu, in another form haihu, the initial h being dropped in composition. This expression is employed for all the varieties of the sentiment, between men, between the sexes, and for that which is regarded as divine.^[391] For “a friend,” they have no other term than one which means a visitor or guest; and from this their expression for “friendship” is derived, which really means “hospitality.”^[392]

Verbal combinations in Guarani are visually simple, and I do not think we can be far wrong in looking upon aihu as a union of the two primary words ai and hu. The former, ai, means self or the same; and the latter, hu, is the verb to find, or, to be present.^[393] “To love,” in Guarani, therefore, would mean, “to find oneself in another,” or, less metaphysically, “to discover in another a likeness to one’s self.” This again is precisely the primary signification of the Latin amare; and if the sentiment impressed in that way the barbarous ancient Aryans, there is no reason why it would not have struck the Guaranis in the same manner.

In the Tupi or Lingua Geral the word for love is evidently but a dialectic variation of that in Guarani. It is given by some authors as ÇaiÇu, plainly a form of haihu; and by others as ÇauÇu.^[394] These forms cannot be analyzed in the Tupi itself, which illustrates its more modern type.

There are other dialects of this widespread stem, but it would not be worth while to follow this expression further in its diverse forms. It is interesting, however, to note that which appears in the Arawack, spoken in Guiana. In that tongue to love is kanisin, in which the radical is ani or ansi. Now we find that ani means “of a kind,” peculiar to, belonging to, etc. Once more it is the notion of similarity, of “birds of a feather,” which underlies the expression for the conception of love.^[395]

CONCLUSIONS.

If, now, we review the ground we have gone over, and classify the conception of love as revealed in the languages under discussion, we find that their original modes of expression were as follows:

1. Inarticulate cries of emotion (Cree, Maya, Qquichua).

2. Assertions of sameness or similarity (Cree, Nahuatl, Tupi, Arawack).

3. Assertions of conjunction or union (Cree, Nahuatl, Maya).

4. Assertions of a wish, desire or longing (Cree, Cakchiquel, Qquichua, Tupi).

These categories are not exhaustive of the words which I have brought forward, but they include most of them, and probably were this investigation extended to embrace numerous other tongues, we should find that in them all the principal expressions for the sentiment of love are drawn from one or other of these fundamental notions. A most instructive fact is that these notions are those which underlie the majority of the words for love in the great Aryan family of languages. They thus reveal the parallel paths which the human mind everywhere pursued in giving articulate expression to the passions and emotions of the soul. In this sense there is a oneness in all languages, which speaks conclusively for the oneness in the sentient and intellectual attributes of the species.

We may also investigate these categories, thus shown to be practically universal, from another point of view. We may inquire which of them comes the nearest to the correct expression of love in its highest philosophic meaning. Was this meaning apprehended, however dimly, by man in the very infancy of his speech-inventing faculty?

In another work, published some years ago, I have attempted a philosophic analysis of the sentiment of love. Quoting from some of the subtlest dissectors of human motive, I have shown that they pronounce love to be “the volition of the end,” or “the resting in an object as an end.” These rather obscure scholastic formulas I have attempted to explain by the definition: “Love is the mental impression of rational action whose end is in itself.”^[396] As every end or purpose of action implies the will or wish to that end, those expressions for love are most truly philosophic which express the will, the desire, the yearning after the object. The fourth, therefore, of the above categories is that which presents the highest forms of expression of this conception. That it also expresses lower forms is true, but this merely illustrates the evolution of the human mind as expressed in language. Love is ever the wish; but while in lower races and coarser natures this wish is for an object which in turn is but a means to an end, for example, sensual gratification, in the higher this object is the end itself, beyond which the soul does not seek to go, in which it rests, and with which both reason and emotion find the satisfaction of boundless activity without incurring the danger of satiety.

Positive progress in constructive art can be accurately estimated by the kind and perfection of the instruments of precision employed by the artists. A correct theory of architecture or of sculpture must have as its foundation a correct system of weights and measures, and recognized units and standards of gravity and extension. Where these are not found, all is guess-work, and a more or less haphazard rule-of-thumb.

In a study of the art-products of Mexico and Central America, it has occurred to me that we may with advantage call linguistics to our aid, and attempt to ascertain, by an analysis of the words for weights and measures, what units, if any, were employed by those who constructed the massive works in that region, which still remain for our astonishment. The tongues I shall examine are the Maya of Yucatan, its related dialect the Cakchiquel of Guatemala, and the Nahuatl or Aztec of Mexico. The most striking monuments of art in North America are found in the territories where these were spoken at the time of the Conquest. The Cakchiquel may be considered to include the Quiche and the Tzutuhil, both of which are closely associated to it as dialects of the same mother tongue.

THE MAYAS.

The generic word in Maya for both measuring and weighing, and for measures and weights, is at present ppiz, the radical sense of which is “to put in order,” “to arrange definite limits.” Its apparent similarity to the Spanish pesar, French peser, etc., seems accidental, as it is in Maya the root of various words meaning battle, to fight, etc., from the “order of battle,” observed on such occasions. Any weight or measure is spoken of as ppizib, to measure land is ppiz-luum, a foot measure ppiz-oc etc. But I am quite certain that the original scope of the word did not include weight, as there is no evidence that the ancient Mayas knew anything about a system of estimating quantity by gravity. If the word is not from the Spanish pesar, it has extended its meaning since the conquest.

The Maya measures are derived directly, and almost exclusively, from the human body, and largely from the hand and foot.

Oc, the foot; chekoc, the footstep, the print or length of the foot, is a measure of length. Other forms of the same are chekel, chekeb, chekeb-oc, etc.; and this abundance of synonyms would seem to show that the measure of a foot was very familiar and frequent. The verb is chekoc (tah, tÉ), as in the phrase:

i. e. He measured by feet the church. From this was distinguished—

Xukab, paces or strides, a word confined to the paces of man. The verb is Xukab (tah, tÉ), to step off, to measure by paces.

Quite a series of measures were recognized from the ground (or, as some say, from the point of the foot) to the upper portions of the body.

Hun cal coy u-xul (one to the neck of the ankle its-end), extending from the ground to the narrowest portion of the ankle.

Hun ppuloc u-xul (one calf-of-the-leg its-end), from the ground to the highest portion of the calf of the leg. The word xul means end or limit, and is used often adverbially, as in the phrase uay u-xul, literally “here its end,” or “thus far” (Span. hasta aqui).

Hun pixib, the distance from the ground (or point of the toes) to the knee-cap, from piix, the knee. Also called hun hol piix, from hol, head, the knee-cap being called “the knee-head.”

Hun hachabex, one girdle, from the ground to the belt or girdle, to which the skirt was fashioned (from hach, to tie, to fasten). The same measure was called hun theth, the word theth being applied to the knot of the girdle.

Hun tanam, from the ground to the border of the true ribs; from tanam, the liver. The Diccionario de Motul gives the example, hun tanam in ual, one tanam (is) my corn, i. e., my corn reaches to my chest. It adds that the measure is from the point of the foot to the chest.

Hun tzem, a measure from the ground to a line drawn from one mamma to the other.

Hun cal u-xul, one neck its-end, from the ground to the border (upper or lower) of the neck.

Hun chi, from the mouth, chi, to the ground.

Hun holom, one head, from the top of the head to the ground. This is also called hun uallah, one time the stature or height of a man, from a root meaning “to draw to a point,” “to finish off.” The Spanish writers say that one uallah was equal to about three varas, and was used as a square measure in meting corn fields.^[398] The Spanish vara differed as much as the English ell, and to the writer in question could not have represented quite two feet. Elsewhere he defines the vara as half a braza or fathom. (See below, betan.)

The hand in Maya is expressed by the word kab, which also means the arm, and is more correctly therefore translated by the anatomical term “upper extremity.” This is not an uncommon example in American tongues. When it is necessary to define the hand specifically the Mayas say u cheel kab, “the branch of the arm,” and for the fingers u nii kab, “the points (literally, noses) of the arm” or upper extremity.

The shortest measurements known to them appear to have been finger-breadths, which are expressed by the phrase u nii kab. The thumb was called u na kab, literally “the mother of the hand” or arm, and as a measure of length the distance from the first joint to the end of the nail was in use and designated by the same term.

With the hand open and the fingers extended, there were three different measures or spans recognized by the Mayas.

1. The nab, from the tip of the thumb to the tip of the middle finger.

2. The oecnab, or little nab, from the tip of the thumb to the tip of the index finger. This is the span yet most in use by the native inhabitants of Yucatan (Dr. Berendt).

3. The chi nab, or the nab which extends to the edge, from the tip of the thumb to the tip of the little finger (Pio Perez).

The kok was a hand measure formed by closing the fingers and extending the thumb. Measuring from the outer border of the hand to the end of the thumb, it would be about seven inches.

The cuc or noch cuc (noch is a term applied to a bony prominence, in this instance to the olecranon) was the cubit, and was measured from the summit of the olecranon to the end of the fingers, about eighteen inches.

The most important of the longer measures was the zap or zapal. It was the distance between the extremities of the extended arms, and is usually put down at a fathom or six feet.

The half of it was called betan or patan, meaning “to the middle of the chest.” Canes and cords were cut of the fixed length of the zap and bore the name xapalche, zapsticks, as our yard-stiÇk (che == stick), and hilppiz, measuring rods (hil, a species of cane, and ppiz, to measure, Dicc. Motul).

On this as a unit, the customary land measure was based. It was the kaan, one shorter, hun kaan tah ox zapalche, a kaan of three zap, and one longer, hun kaan tah can zapalche, a kaan of four zap. The former is stated to be thirty-six fathoms square, the latter forty-eight fathoms square. Twenty kaan made a vinic, man, that amount of land being considered the area requisite to support one family in maize.

The uncertainty about this measure is increased by the evident error of Bishop Landa, or more probably his copyist, in making the vinic equal to 400 square feet, which even in the most favored soils would never support a family. He probably said “400 feet square,” which in that climate would be sufficient. The kaan is said by Spanish writers to be equal to the Mexican mecate, which contains 5184 square feet. I acknowledge, however, that I have not reconciled all the statements reported by authors about these land measures.

Greater measures of length are rarely mentioned. Journeys were measured by lub, which the Spaniards translated “leagues,” but by derivation it means “resting places,” and I have not ascertained that it had a fixed length.

The Mayas were given to the drawing of maps, and the towns had the boundaries of their common lands laid out in definite lines. I have manuscripts, some dated as early in 1542, which describe these town lands. In most of them only the courses are given, but not the distances. In one, a title to a domain in Acanceh, there are distances given, but in a measure quite unknown to me, sicina, preceded by the numeral and its termination indicating measures, hulucppiz sicina, eleven sicinas.^[399]

The maps indicate relative position only, and were evidently not designed by a scale, or laid off in proportion to distance. The distinguished Yucatecan antiquary, the Rev. Don Crescencio Carrillo, in his essay on the cartography of the ancient Mayas,^[400] apparently came to the same conclusion, as he does not mention any method of measurement.

I do not know of any measurements undertaken in Yucatan to ascertain the metrical standard employed by the ancient architects. It is true that Dr. Augustus LePlongeon asserts positively that they knew and used the metric system, and that the metre and its divisions are the only dimensions that can be applied to the remains of the edifices.^[401] But apart from the eccentricity of this statement, I do not see from Dr. LePlongeon’s own measurements that the metre is in any sense a common divisor for them.

From the linguistic evidence, I incline to believe that the oc, the foot, was their chief lineal unit. This name was also applied to the seventh day of the series of twenty which made up the Maya month; and there may be some connection between these facts and the frequent recurrence of the number seven in the details of their edifices.^[402]

THE CAKCHIQUELS.

The root-word for measuring length is, in Cakchiquel, et. Its primitive meaning is, a sign, a mark, a characteristic. From this root are derived the verbal etah, to measure length, to lay out a plan, to define limits; etal, a sign, mark, limit; etabal, measuring field; etamah, to know, i. e., to recognize the signs and characters of things; etamanizah, to cause to know, to teach, to instruct, etc.

My authorities do not furnish evidence that the Cakchiquels used the foot as the unit of measurement, differing in this from the Mayas. They had, however, like the latter, a series of measurements from the ground to certain points of the body, and they used a special terminal particle, bem (probably from be, to go), “up to” to indicate such measurements, as vexibem, up to the girdle (vex, girdle, i, connective, bem, up to, or “it goes to”).

These body measures, as far as I have found them named, are as follows:

quequebem, from the ground to the knee.

ru-vach a, from the ground to the middle of the thigh; literally “its front, the thigh,” ru, its, vach, face, front, a, the muscles of the thigh.

vexibem, from the ground to the girdle, vex.

qaalqaxibem, from the ground to the first true ribs.

kulim, from the ground to the neck (kul).

The more exact Cakchiquel measures were derived from the upper extremity. The smallest was the finger breadth, and was spoken of as one, two, three, four fingers, han ca, cay ca, ox ca, cah ca (ca=finger). This was used in connection with the measure called tuvic, the same that I have described as the Maya kok, obtained by closing the hand and extending the thumb. They combined these in such expressions as ca tuvic raqin han ca, two tuvics with (plus) one finger breadth.^[403]

The span of the Cakchiquels was solely that obtained by extending the thumb and fingers and including the space between the extremities of the thumb and middle finger. It was called qutu, from the radical qut, which means to show, to make manifest, and is hence akin in meaning to the root et, mentioned above.

The cubit, chumay, was measured from the point of the elbow to the extremities of the fingers. We are expressly informed by Father Coto that this was a customary building measure. “When they build their houses they use this cubit to measure the length of the logs. They also measure ropes in the same manner, and say, Tin chumaih retaxic riqam, I lay out in cubits the rope with which I am to measure.”

The different measures drawn from the arms were:

chumay, from the elbow to the end of the fingers of the same hand.

hahmehl, from the elbow to the ends of the fingers of the opposite hand, the arms being outstretched.

telen, from the point of the shoulder of one side to the ends of the fingers of the outstretched arm on the other side.

tzam telen, from the point of the shoulder to the ends of the fingers on the same side. Tzam means nose, point, beak, etc.

ru vach qux, from the middle of the breast to the end of the outstretched hand.

hah, from the tips of the fingers of one hand to those of the other, the arms outstretched.

Another measure was from the point of the shoulder to the wrist.

The hah, or fathom, was one of the units of land measure, and the corn fields and cacao plantations were surveyed and laid out with ropes, qam, marked off in fathoms. The fields are described as of five ropes, ten ropes, etc., but I have not found how many fathoms each rope contained.

Another unit of land measure in frequent use was the maaoh. This was the circumference of the human figure. A man stood erect, his feet together, and both arms extended. The end of a rope was placed under his feet and its slack passed over one hand, then on top of his head, then over the other hand, and finally brought to touch the beginning. This gives somewhat less than three times the height. This singular unit is described by both Varea and Coto as in common use by the natives.

There were no accurate measures of long distances. As among the Mayas, journeys were counted by resting places, called in Cakchiquel uxlanibal, literally “breathing places,” from uxla, the breath, itself, a derivative of the radical ux, to exist, to be, to live, the breath being taken as the most evident sign of life.

There was originally no word in Cakchiquel meaning “to weigh,” as in a balance, and therefore they adopted the Spanish peso, as tin pesoih, I weigh. Nor, although they constructed stone walls of considerable height, did they have any knowledge of the plumb line or plummet. The name they gave it even shows that they had no idea what its use was, as they called it “the piece of metal for fastening together,” supposing it to be an aid in cementing the stone work, rather than in adjusting its lines.^[404]

In turning to the Mexicans or Aztecs, some interesting problems present themselves. As far as I can judge by the Nahuatl language, measures drawn from the upper extremity were of secondary importance, and were not the bases of their metrical standards, and, as I shall show, this is borne out by a series of proofs from other directions.

The fingers, mapilli, appear to have been customary measures. They are mentioned in the early writers as one equal to an inch. The name mapilli, is a synthesis of maitl, hand, and pilli, child, offspring, addition, etc.

The span was called miztetl or miztitl, a word of obvious derivation, meaning “between the finger nails,” from iztetl, finger nail. This span, however, was not like ours, from the extremity of the thumb to the extremity of the little finger, nor yet like that of the Cakchiquels, from the extremity of the thumb to that of the middle finger, but like that now in use among the Mayas (see above), from the extremity of the thumb to that of the index finger.^[405]

There were four measures from the point of the elbow; one to the wrist of the same arm, a second to the wrist of the opposite arm, a third to the ends of the fingers of the same arm, and the fourth to the ends of the fingers of the opposite arm, the arms always considered as extended at right angles to the body. The terms for these are given somewhat confusedly in my authorities, but I believe the following are correct.

1. From the elbow to the wrist of the same arm; cemmatzotzopatzli, “a little arm measure,” from ce, a, one, ma from maitl, arm or hand, tzotzoca, small, inferior, patzoa, to make small, to diminish.

2. From the elbow to the wrist of the opposite arm, cemmitl, an arrow, a shaft, from ce, and mitl, arrow, this distance being the approved length of an arrow. We may compare the old English expression, a “cloth-yard shaft.”

3. From the elbow to the ends of the fingers of the same arm, cemmolicpitl, one elbow, ce, one, molicpitl, elbow. This is the cubit.

4. From the elbow to the ends of the fingers of the opposite arm.

The following were the arm measures:

CemaÇolli, from the tip of the shoulder to the end of the hand (ce, one, maÇoa, to extend the arm).

Cemmatl, from the tip of the fingers of one hand to those of the other. Although this word is apparently a synthesis of ce, one, maitl, arm, and means “one arm,” it is uniformly rendered by the early writers una braza, a fathom.

Cenyollotli, from the middle of the breast to the end of the fingers (ce, one, yollotl, breast).

It is known that the Aztecs had a standard measure of length which they employed in laying out grounds and constructing buildings. It was called the octacatl, but neither the derivation of this word, nor the exact length of the measure it represented, has been positively ascertained. The first syllable, oc, it will be noticed, is the same as the Maya word for foot, and in Nahuatl xocopalli is “the sole of the foot.” This was used as a measure by the decimal system, and there were in Nahuatl two separate and apparently original words to express a measure of ten foot-lengths. One was:

Matlaxocpallatamachiualoni, which formidable synthesis is analyzed as follows: matla, from matlactli, ten, xocpal, from xocpalli, foot-soles, tamachiuia, to measure (from machiotl, a sign or mark, like the Cakchiquel etal) l, for lo, sign of the passive, oni, a verbal termination “equivalent to the Latin bilis or dus.”^[406] Thus the word means that which is measurable by ten foot-lengths.

The second word was matlacyxitlatamachiualoni.

The composition of this is similar to the former, except that in the place of the perhaps foreign root xoc, foot, yxitl, foot, is used, which seems to have been the proper Nahuatl term.

As these words prove that the foot-length was one of the standards of the Aztecs, it remains to be seen whether they enlighten us as to the octacail. I quote in connection an interesting passage by the native historian, Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl in his Historia Chichimeca, published in Lord Kingsborough’s great work on Mexico (Vol. ix., p. 242). Ixtlilxochitl is describing the vast communal dwelling built by the Tezcucan chieftain Nezahualcoyotl, capable of accommodating over two thousand persons. He writes: “These houses were in length from east to west four hundred and eleven and a half [native] measures, which reduced to our [Spanish] measures make twelve hundred and thirty-four and a half yards (varas), and in breadth, from north to south three hundred and twenty-six measures, which are nine hundred and seventy-eight yards.”

This passage has been analyzed by the learned antiquary, SeÑor Orozco y Berra.^[407] The native measure referred to by Ixtlilxochitl was that of Tezcuco, which was identical with that of Mexico. The yard was the vara de Burgos, which had been ordered to be adopted throughout the colony by an ordinance of the viceroy Antonio de Mendoza. This vara was in length 0.838 metre, and, as according to the chronicler, the native measurement was just three times this (411½ x 3 = 1234½, and 326 x 3 = 978), it must have been 2.514 metre. This is equal in our measure to 9.842 feet, or, say, nine feet ten inches.

This would make the octacatl identical with those long-named ten-foot measures, which, as I have shown, were multiples of the length of the foot, as is proved by an analysis of their component words.

This result is as interesting as it is new, since it demonstrates that the metrical unit of ancient Mexico was the same as that of ancient Rome—the length of the foot-print.

Some testimony of another kind may be brought to illustrate this point.

In 1864, the Mexican government appointed a commission to survey the celebrated ruins of Teotihuacan, under the care of Don Ramon Almaraz. At the suggestion of SeÑor Orozco, this able engineer ran a number of lines of construction to determine what had been the metrical standard of the builders. His decision was that it was “about” met. 0.8, or, say, 31½ inches.^[408] This is very close to an even third of the octacatl, and would thus be a common divisor of lengths laid off by it.

I may here turn aside from my immediate topic to compare these metrical standards with that of the Mound-Builders of the Ohio valley.

In the American Antiquarian, April, 1881, Prof. W. J. McGee applied Mr. Petrie’s arithmetical system of “inductive metrology” to a large number of measurements of mounds and earthworks in Iowa, with the result of ascertaining a common standard of 25.716 inches.

In 1883, Col. Charles Whittlesey, of Cleveland, analyzed eighty-seven measurements of Ohio earthworks by the method of even divisors and concluded that thirty inches was about the length, or was one of the multiples, of their metrical standard.^[409]

Moreover, fifty-seven per cent of all the lines were divisible without remainder by ten feet. How much of this may have been owing to the tendency of hurried measurers to average on fives and tens, I cannot say; but leaving this out of the question, there is a probability that a ten foot-length rule was used by the “mound-builders” to lay out their works.

It may not be out of place to add a suggestion here as to the applicability of the methods of inductive metrology to American monuments. The proportions given above by Ixtlilxochitl, it will be noted, are strikingly irregular (411½, 326). Was this accident or design? Very likely the latter, based upon some superstitious or astrological motive. It is far from a solitary example. It recurs everywhere in the remarkable ruins of Mitla. “Careful attention,” says Mr. Louis H. AymÉ, “has been paid to make the whole asymmetrical. *** This asymmetry of Mitla is not accidental, I am certain, but made designedly. M. DesirÉ Charnay tells me he has observed the same thing at Palenque.” These examples should be a warning against placing implicit reliance on the mathematical procedures for obtaining the lineal standards of these forgotten nations.^[410]

Whatever the lineal standard of the Aztecs may have been, we have ample evidence that it was widely recognized, very exact, and officially defined and protected. In the great market of Mexico, to which thousands flocked from the neighboring country (seventy thousand in a day, says Cortes, but we can cut this down one-half in allowance for the exaggeration of an enthusiast), there were regularly appointed government officers to examine the measures used by the merchants and compare them with the correct standard. Did they fall short, the measures were broken and the merchant severely punished as an enemy to the public weal.^[411]

The road-measures of the Aztecs was by the stops of the carriers, as we have seen was also the case in Guatemala. In Nahuatl these were called neceuilli, resting places, or netlatolli, sitting places; and distances were reckoned numerically by these, as one, two, three, etc., resting places. Although this seems a vague and inaccurate method, usage had attached comparatively definite ideas of distance to these terms. Father Duran tells us that along the highways there were posts or stones erected with marks upon them showing how many of these stops there were to the next market-towns—a sort of mile-stones, in fact. As the competition between the various markets was very active, each set up its own posts, giving its distance, and adding a curse on all who did not attend, or were led away by the superior attractions of its rivals.^[412]

So far as I have learned, the lineal measures above mentioned were those applied to estimate superficies. In some of the plans of fields, etc., handed down, the size is marked by the native numerals on one side of the plan, which are understood to indicate the square measure of the included tract. The word in Nahuatl meaning to survey or measure lands is tlalpoa, literally “to count land,” from tlalli land, poa to count.

The Aztecs were entirely ignorant of balances, scales or weights. Cortes says distinctly that when he visited the great market of Mexico-Tenochtitlan, he saw all articles sold by number and measure, and nothing by weight.^[413] The historian Herrera confirms this from other authorities, and adds that when grass or hay was sold, it was estimated by the length of a cord which could be passed around the bundle.^[414]

The plumb-line must have been unknown to the Mexicans also. Their called it temetztepilolli, “the piece of lead which is hung from on high,” from temetzli, lead, and piloa, to fasten something high up. Lead was not unknown to the Aztecs before the conquest. They collected it in the Provinces of Tlachco and Itzmiquilpan, but did not esteem it of much value, and their first knowledge of it as a plummet must have been when they saw it in the hands of the Spaniards. Hence their knowledge of the instrument itself could not have been earlier.

The conclusions to which the above facts tend are as follows:

1. In the Maya system of lineal measures, foot, hand, and body measures were nearly equally prominent, but the foot unit was the customary standard.

2. In the Cakchiquel system, hand and body measures were almost exclusively used, and of these, those of the hand prevailed.

3. In the Aztec system, body measurements were unimportant, hand and arm measures held a secondary position, while the foot measure was adopted as the official and obligatory standard both in commerce and architecture.

4. The Aztec terms for their lineal standard being apparently of Maya origin, suggest that their standard was derived from that nation.

5. Neither of the three nations was acquainted with a system of estimation by weight, nor with the use of the plumb-line, nor with an accurate measure of long distances.

One might think it a difficult task to manufacture a new language “from the whole cloth;” but, in fact, it is no great labor. We have but to remember that within the last dozen years more than a dozen “world-languages” have been framed and offered for acceptance, and we at once perceive that a moderate knowledge of tongues and some linguistic ingenuity are all that is required.

It is an innocent amusement so long as no fraudulent use is made of the manufactured product; but the temptation to play a practical joke, and to palm off a deception on overeager linguists, is as great in languages as it is in archÆology—and every antiquary knows how suspiciously he has to scrutinize each new specimen.

A curious hoax, which deceived some of the best linguists of Europe and America, was perpetrated about a decade ago by two young French seminarists, Jean Parisot and A. Dejouy. Interested by reading ChÂteaubriand, and by various publications on American languages which appeared in France about that time, they made up a short grammar and a list of words of what they called the Tansa language, from a name they found in ChÂteaubriand’s Voyage en Amerique, and into this invented tongue they translated the Lord’s Prayer, the Creed, an Algonkin hymn published in Paris, and other material.

At first, the two students pursued this occupation merely as an amusement, but it soon occurred to them that more could be made of it; so M. Parisot sent a batch of the alleged “fragments” of the “Tansa” to the publishers, Maisonneuve et Cie, Paris, for publication. The manuscripts were passed over to M. Julien Vinson, editor of the RÉvue de Linguistique, who addressed the young author for further particulars. M. Parisot replied that these pieces were copies of originals obtained many years before by his grandfather, from what source he knew not, and on the strength of this vague statement, they duly appeared in the RÉvue.

Their publication attracted the attention of the eminent French linguist, M. Lucien Adam, who had long occupied himself with American tongues, and he entered into correspondence with M. Parisot. The latter’s stock meanwhile had considerably increased. He and his friend had published at Epinal, apparently privately, a small pamphlet, with an introductory note in bad Spanish, containing a number of “songs” in the “Taensa,” as they now called their language. They claimed in the note that the songs had been obtained by a traveler in America, in the year 1827 or 1828, “in the Taensa town, on the banks of the Mississippi or the Alabama”(!)^[415]

With this abundant material at hand, young Parisot replied cheerfully to M. Adam, and supplied that scientist with “copy” from the alleged ancestral MSS. quite enough to fill a goodly volume of grammar, songs, lexicon, and the various paraphernalia of a linguistic apparatus, all of which eager M. Adam and his collaborator, Mr. A. S. Gatschet, the expert linguist attached to our Bureau of Ethnology, received in good faith and without a suspicion of the joker who victimized them; and what is more singular, without having a doubt excited by the many and gross blunders of the young seminarist.

Their joint work reached the United States in 1883, and for two years was received both here and in Europe as a genuine production. My attention was first attracted to it in 1883, and then I referred to it as a “strange” production; but I did not give it a close examination until the close of 1884. This examination led me to prepare the following article, which was published in the American Antiquarian for March, 1885:

THE TAENSA GRAMMAR AND DICTIONARY.

The student of American languages is under many obligations to the editors and publishers of the BibliothÉque Linguistique AmÉricaine, nine volumes of which have been issued by the firm of Maisonneuve et Cie., Paris. Most of these contain valuable authentic original material, from approved sources, and edited with judgment. The exception to this rule is the volume last issued, which from its character deserves more than a passing criticism.

This volume bears the following title: Grammaire et Vocabulaire de la Langue Taensa, avec Textes Traduits et CommentÉs par J. D. HaumontÉ, Parisot, L. Adam. Pp. 19, III. It contains what professes to be a grammar of the Taensas Indians, who lived near the banks of the lower Mississippi, in the parish of that name in Louisiana, when it was first discovered, but who have long since become extinct. Following the grammar are the “Texts,” a remarkable series of native songs in the alleged Taensa tongue, with a French translation, accompanied by a commentary and a vocabulary.

All this array has been received by scholars without question. It looks so extremely scientific and satisfactory that no one has dared assail its authenticity. Moreover, the book appears with an historical introduction by Mr. Albert S. Gatschet, of our Bureau of Ethnology, and one of the editors is M. Lucien Adam, a gentleman who stands at the head of European Americanists. Mr. Gatschet, moreover, fully recognizes the authenticity of the whole in his latest work, and up to the present I know of no one who has doubted it, either in this country or in Europe.

It is, therefore, only after a great deal of consideration and hesitation that I now give publicity to the opinion I have long entertained, that a gross deception has been somewhere practiced in the preparation of this book, and that it is not at all what it purports to be. Let it be understood that I distinctly exculpate the gentlemen I have named from any share in this; they can only be charged with the venial error of allowing their enthusiasm for knowledge to get the better of their critical acumen.

I shall proceed to give with as much brevity as possible the reasons which have led me to reject the pretended character of this work.

And first I may note that both the history of the alleged original manuscript and the method in which it has been presented are to the last degree unsatisfactory. About the former, M. HaumontÉ tells us that among the papers of his grandfather, who died as mayor of PlombÈres, in 1872, he found a manuscript in Spanish, without date or name of author, and that it is this manuscript “translated and arranged,” which is the work before us. M. Adam adds that for his part he had revised this translation and advised the omission of certain passages not “profitable to science.” I have been informed by a private source that M. Adam was not shown the original Spanish manuscript, although he asked to see it. We are deprived therefore of any expert opinion as to the age of the manuscript, or its authorship.

We naturally ask, how did this manuscript come to be in Spanish? No one has been able to point out in the voluminous histories of the Spanish Missions a single reference to any among the Taensas. Moreover, this tribe was constantly under French observation from its first discovery by La Salle in 1682, until its entire destruction and disappearance about 1730–40, as is minutely recorded by Charlevoix, who even adds the name of the planter who obtained the concession of their lands. With the knowledge we have of the early Louisiana colony, it would have been next to impossible for a Spanish monk to have lived with them long enough to have acquired their language, and no mention to have been made of him in the French accounts. That a Spaniard, not a monk, should have attempted it, would have excited still more attention from national distrust.

This preliminary ground of skepticism is not removed by turning to the grammar itself. As M. Adam remarks, the language is one “of extreme simplicity,” such simplicity that it excites more than the feeling of astonishment. How much liberty M. HaumontÉ allowed himself in his translation he unfortunately does not inform us; but I suppose that he scarcely went so far as to offer original opinions on the pronunciation of a language which no man has heard spoken for more than a century. If he did not, then the writer of the original manuscript must have been a pretty good linguist for his day, since he explains the pronunciation of the Taensa by the French, the English, the German, and the Spanish!! (p. 4). I suppose the references on p. 11, to the Nahuatl, Kechua and Algonkin tongues are by the translator, though we are not so told; at any rate, they are by some one who has given a certain amount of study to American languages, and could get up one not wholly unlike them. There is, however, just enough unlikeness to all others in the so-called Taensa to make us accept it “with all reserves,” as the French say. That an American language should have a distinctively grammatical gender, that it should have a true relative pronoun, that its numeral system should be based on the nine units in the extraordinarily simple manner here proposed, that it should have three forms of the plural, that its verbs should present the singular simplicity of these,—these traits are indeed not impossible, but they are too unusual not to demand the best of evidence.

But the evidence which leaves no doubt as to the hum-buggery in this whole business is found in the so-called “Cancionero Taensa,” or Taensa Poems. There are eleven of these, and according to M. Adam, “they give us unexpected information about the manners, customs and social condition of the Taensas.” If he had also added, still more unexpected information about the physical geography of Louisiana, he would have spoken yet more to the point. For instance, our botanists will be charmed to learn that the sugar maple flourishes in the Louisiana swamps, and that it furnished a favorite food of the natives. It is repeatedly referred to (pp. 31, 34, 45, 67). They will also learn that the sugar cane was raised by the Taensas, although the books say it was introduced into Louisiana by the Jesuits in 1761 (p. 45). The potato and rice, apples and bananas, were also familiar to them, and the white birch and wild rice are described as flourishing around the bayous of the lower Mississippi! It may be urged that these are all mistranslations of misunderstood native words. To this I reply, what sort of editing is that which not only could commit such unpardonable blunders, but send them forth to the scientific world without a hint that they do not pretend to be anything more than guesses?

But no such apology can be made. The author of this fabrication had not taken the simplest precaution to make his statements coincide with facts. How dense was his ignorance of the climate of Louisiana is manifested in the pretended “Calendar of the Taensas,” which is printed on p. 41 of his book. He tells us that their year began at the vernal equinox and consisted of twelve or thirteen months named as follows:

How absurd on the face of it, such a calendar would be for the climate of Tensas Parish, La., need not be urged. The wonder is that any intelligent editor would pass it over without hesitation. The not infrequent references to snow and ice might and ought to have put him on his guard.

The text and vocabulary teem with such impossibilities; while the style of the alleged original songs is utterly unlike that reported from any other native tribe. It much more closely resembles the stilted and tumid imitations of supposed savage simplicity, common enough among French writers of the eighteenth century.

As a fair example of the nonsense of the whole, I will translate the last song given in the book, that called

1. The chief of the Chactas has come to the land of the warriors “I come.” “Thou comest.”

2. Around his body is a beautiful garment, he wears large leggings, sandals, tablets of white wood, feathers behind his head and behind his shoulders, on his head the antlers of a deer, a heavy war club in his right hand.

3. What is the wish of the great warrior who has come?

4. He wishes to speak to the chief of the numerous and powerful Taensas.

5. Let the warrior enter the house of the old men. The chief is seated in the midst of the old men. He will certainly hear thee. Enter the house of the old men.

6. Great chief, old man, I enter. Thou comest. Enter; bring him in. What wishes the foreign warrior? Speak, thou who hast come.

7. Old men, ancient men, I am the chief of many men; at ten days’ journey up the river there lies the land of poplars, the land of the wild rice, which belongs to the brave warriors, the brothers of the Taensas.

8. They said to me—since thou hast not chosen a bride, go to the Taensas our brothers, ask of them a bride; for the Chactas are strong; we will ask a bride of the Taensas.

9. That is well; but speak, warrior, are the Chactas numerous?

10. Count; they are six hundred, and I am stronger than ten.

11. That is well; but speak, do they know how to hunt the buffalo and the deer? does the squirrel run in your great forests?

12. The land of the wild rice has no great forests, but cows, stags and elks dwell in our land in great numbers.

13. What plants grow in your country?

14. Poplars, the slupe tree, the myrtle grow there, we have the sugar maple, ebony to make collars, the oak from which to make war clubs; our hills have magnolias whose shining leaves cover our houses.

15. That is well; the Taensas have neither the slupe tree nor the ebony, but they have the wax tree and the vine: has the land of the wild rice these also?

16. The Taensas are strong and rich, the Chactas are strong also, they are the brothers of the Taensas.

17. The Taensas love the brave Chactas, they will give you a bride; but say, dost thou come alone? dost thou bring bridal presents.

18. Twenty warriors are with me, and bulls drag a wain.

19. Let six, seven, twenty Taensa warriors go forth to meet those who come. For thee, we will let thee see the bride, she is my daughter, of me, the great chief; she is young; she is beautiful as the lily of the waters; she is straight as the white birch; her eyes are like unto the tears of gum that distil from the trees; she knows how to prepare the meats for the warriors and the sap of the sugar maple; she knows how to knit the fishing nets and keep in order the weapons of war—we will show thee the bride.

20. The strangers have arrived, the bulls have dragged up the wain. The warrior offers his presents to the bride, paint for her eyes, fine woven stuff, scalps of enemies, collars, beautiful bracelets, rings for her feet, and swathing-bands for her first born.

21. The father of the bride and the old man receive skins, horns of deer, solid bows and sharpened arrows.

22. Now let the people repose during the night; at sunrise there shall be a feast; then you shall take the bride in marriage.

And this is the song of the marriage.

The assurance which has offered this as a genuine composition of a Louisiana Indian is only equalled by the docility with which it has been accepted by Americanists. The marks of fraud upon it are like Falstaff’s lies—“gross as a mountain, open, palpable.” The Choctaws are located ten days’ journey up the Mississippi in the wild rice region about the head-waters of the stream, whereas they were the immediate neighbors of the real Taensas, and dwelt when first discovered in the middle and southern parts of the present State of Mississippi. The sugar maple is made to grow in the Louisiana swamps, the broad-leaved magnolia and the ebony in Minnesota. The latter is described as the land of the myrtle, and the former of the vine. The northern warrior brings feet-rings and infant clothing as presents, while the southern bride knows all about boiling maple sap, and is like a white birch. But the author’s knowledge of aboriginal customs stands out most prominently when he has the up-river chief come with an ox-cart and boast of his cows! After that passage I need say nothing more. He is indeed ignorant who does not know that not a single draft animal, and not one kept for its milk, was ever found among the natives of the Mississippi valley.

I have made other notes tending in the same direction, but it is scarcely necessary for me to proceed further. If the whole of this pretended Taensa language has been fabricated, it would not be the first time in literary history that such a fraud has been perpetrated. In the last century, George Psalmanazar framed a grammar of a fictitious language in Formosa, which had no existence whatever. So it seems to be with the Taensa; not a scrap of it can be found elsewhere, not a trace of any such tongue remains in Louisiana. What is more, all the old writers distinctly deny that this tribe had any independent language. M. De Montigny, who was among them in 1699, Father Gravier, who was also at their towns, and Du Pratz, the historian, all say positively that the Taensas spoke the Natchez language, and were part of the same people. We have ample specimens of the Natchez, and it is nothing like this alleged Taensa. Moreover, we have in old writers the names of the Taensa villages furnished by the Taensas themselves, and they are nowise akin to the matter of this grammar, but are of Chahta-Muskoki derivation.

What I have now said is I think sufficient to brand this grammar and its associated texts as deceptions practiced on the scientific world. If it concerns the editors and introducers of that work to discover who practiced and is responsible for that deception, let the original manuscript be produced and submitted to experts; if this is not done, let the book be hereafter pilloried as an imposture.

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As soon as I could obtain reprints of the above article I forwarded them to M. Adam and others interested in American languages, and M. Adam at once took measures to obtain from the now “AbbÉ” Parisot the original MSS. That young ecclesiastic, however, professed entire ignorance of their whereabouts; he had wholly forgotten what disposition he had made of this portion of his grandfather’s papers! He also charged M. Adam with having worked over (remaniÉ) his material; and finally disclaimed all responsibility concerning it.

In spite, however, of his very unsatisfactory statements, M. Adam declined to recognize the fabrication of the tongue, and expressed himself so at length in a brochure entitled, Le Taensa a-t-il ÉtÉ forgÉ de toutes PiÈces? RÉponse À M. Daniel G. Brinton (pp. 22, Maissonneuve FrÈres et Ch. Leclerc, Paris, 1885). The argument which he made use of will be seen from the following reply which I published in The American Antiquarian, September, 1885:

THE TAENSA GRAMMAR AND DICTIONARY.

The criticism on the Taensa Grammar published in the American Antiquarian last March has led to a reply from M. Lucien Adam, the principal editor, under the following title: “Le Taensa a-t-il-ÉtÉ forgÉ de toutes PiÉces?” As the question at issue is one of material importance to American archÆology, I shall state M. Adam’s arguments in defense of the Grammar.

It will be remembered that the criticism published last March closed with an urgent call for the production of the original MS., which M. Adam himself had never seen. To meet this, M. Adam as soon as practicable applied to M. Parisot, who alleged that he had translated the Grammar from the Spanish original, to produce that original. This M. Parisot professed himself unable to do; although only two or three years have elapsed, he cannot remember what he did with it, and he thinks it possible that it is lost or destroyed! The investigations, however, reveal two facts quite clearly: first, that the original MS., if there was one, was not in Spanish as asserted, and was not in the handwriting of M. Parisot’s grandfather, as was also asserted, as the latter was certainly not the kind of man to occupy himself with any such document. He kept a sort of boardinghouse, and the suggestion now is that one of his temporary guests left this supposed MS. at his house. As its existence is still in doubt, this uncertainty about its origin need not further concern us.

The more important question is whether the language as presented in the Grammar and texts bears internal evidence of authenticity or not.

M. Adam begins with the texts, the so-called poems. To my surprise, M. Adam, so far as they pretend to be native productions, tosses them overboard without the slightest compunction. “In my own mind,” he writes, “I have always considered them the work of some disciple of the Jesuit Fathers, who had taken a fancy to the Taensa poetry.” This emphatic rejection of their aboriginal origin has led me to look over the volume again, as it seemed to me that if such was the opinion of the learned editor he should certainly have hinted it to his readers. Not the slightest intimation of the kind can be found in its pages.

The original MS. having disappeared, and the texts having been ruled out as at best the botch-work of some European, M. Adam takes his stand on the Grammar and maintains its authenticity with earnestness.

I named in my criticism six points in the grammatical structure of the alleged Taensa, specifying them as so extremely rare in American languages, that it demanded the best evidence to suppose that they all were present in this extraordinary tongue.

These points are discussed with much acuteness and fairness by M. Adam, and his arguments within these limits are considered convincing by so eminent an authority as Professor Friederich MÜller, of Vienna, to whom they were submitted, and whose letter concerning them he publishes. What M. Adam does is to show that each of the peculiarities named finds a parallel in other American tongues, or he claims that the point is not properly taken. As I never denied the former, but merely called attention to the rarity of such features, the question is, whether the evidence is sufficient to suppose that several of them existed in this tongue; while as to the correctness of my characterization of Taensa Grammar, scholars will decide that for themselves.

It will be seen from the above that, even if some substructure will be shown to have existed for this Taensa Grammar and texts (which, individually, I still deny), it has been presented to the scientific world under conditions which were far from adequate to the legitimate demands of students.

M. Adam in the tone of his reply is very fair and uniformly courteous, except in his last sentence, where he cannot resist the temptation to have a fling at us for the supposed trait which Barnum and his compeers have conferred upon us among those who do not know us. “Permettezmoi de vous dire,” he writes, “que la France n’est point la terre classique du humbug.” Has M. Adam forgotten that George Psalmanazar, he who in the last century manufactured a language out of the whole cloth, grammar and dictionary and all, was a Frenchman born and bred? And that if the author of the Taensa volume has done the same, his only predecessor in this peculiar industry is one of his own nation?

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M. Adam continued his praiseworthy efforts to unearth the imaginary originals of the AbbÉ Parisot’s hoax, but with the results one can easily anticipate—they were not forthcoming.^[416]

The discussion continued in a desultory manner for some time, and Mr. Gatschet made the most strenuous efforts during his official journeys as government linguist in the southwest and in the Indian territory to find evidence showing that he had not been taken in by the ingenious French seminarists; but his continued silence was evidence enough that none such came to his ken.

In 1886 Professor Julien Vinson reviewed the question for the RÉvue de Linguistique, and delivered what may be considered the final verdict in the case. It is to the effect that the whole alleged language of the Taensas,—grammar, vocabulary, prose and poetry—is a fabrication by a couple of artful students to impose on the learned. I may close with the Professor’s own closing words:

“Que restera-t-il du taensa? A mon avis, une mystification sans grande portÉe et much ado about nothing.”