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Show 82 ON TilE DISTRIBUTION AND particular and general. The exclusive plural, in certain dialects, applies itself to tho orator, and to tho community to which he belongs, by excluding tho others; whereas, in sundry dialects, this same plural applies to those in whoso name one speaks, to the exclnsion of tho persons to whom one is addressing a discourse. One trait of tho grammar of American languages, that has greatly struck tho fi.rst Europeans who sought to grasp their rules, is what they have called transition. 'l'his process, otherwise intimately conn<' dcu with polysynthetism, consists in dissolving the pronoun indicative of the subjcct,-no less than that one indicating the objcct,into tho verb, so as to omposo but a single word. lienee it follows that no verb can be employed without its governing case (regime). The number of these transitions val'ios according to tho languages, nnd the pronoun incorporates itself with the verb generally by suffixes. By means of a modification of tho principal radical, American tongues arrive at rendering all the accessory or derived notions that attach themselves to the iuca of verb. IIonco arises a vast number of voies. These changes constitute all the riches of the Now World's idioms. This abu nuance of changes is above all striking in the Algonquin, and in JJaltlcota,-tbe language of an important Sioux tribe. On the contrary, in tho Moxo,-a tongue of South America, the conjugations roduco themselves to one. IIoro we have a new trait of resemblance between the idioms of Africa and those of tho New World. A classification of American languages has been attempted. It is a di:fficult undertaking; because, in general, amid populations that live by tribes exceedingly fracted, and in a savage state, words become extremely al tercel in passing from one tribe to another. New words are created with great facility; and wore one to take but the differences into acc~u~t, it might bo ?elioved that these languages a~·~ fundamcntall~ d1stmct. The crud1te Swiss, long a distinguished c1t1zen of the Urntod States-successor, in philology, to a learned Franc~-Amorican, DuPONCEAu-Mn. GAUATIN, has found in North Am01:LCa alone some 37 families of tongues, comprising more than 100 .d~alccts; and eve~ then ho was far from having exhausted all the 1d1oms of that portion of the world. It is true that he embraces within his classification, the Eslcimaux and Athapasaan idioms which appertain, as well as certainly the former race, to tho Ougro~Finnic stock,-~~herwise termed tho boreal branch. Among North American fam1hes, those of the Algonquin, Iroquois, Oherolcee, Olwataw and Sioux, are tho most important; but, concerning the indigenous to?gnes ~pokon around tho Hios, Gila and Colorado, philological sc1onco h1thcrto possesses only vague information. CLASSD'ICATION OF TONGUES. 83 At tho centre of America we meet with four families, viz : the family Quialto-Maya, of which the chief representatives are tho i~ioms of Yucatan;-the second family is exhibited in the Otomi, whLCh at first had been erroneously made a completely separate typo,-the third is tho Lenaa family, principally spread over the territory of IIonduras,- and lastly1 the fourth family is repros.ontcd by tbe Nahuatl otherwise called the ancient Mexican; of wh1ch wo possess literary 'm onuments written in a kind of hicroglyp h.1 cs. The Quiahen, or Quialtoa-language of the Incas-comprc~ongs several dialects, of which tho principal is tho Aymara. Th~ Qmohoa, of all tho families of tho Now World, possesses roost proromcntly tho polysynthetical character. Tho Guarani family, to which the Ohilian attaches itself manifests a very great grammatical development. It was spread throughout tho south and cast of ~ustral America, an~ was spoken over a vast expanse of territory. Fmal\y, tho t':o fam~lies, the Pampean or Moxo, and the Om·a~b, occupy, m the hiCrarclncalladder of American idioms, the very lowest rungs. In these thoro is excessive simplicity,-for instance, in the Galibi, spoken by ~avage tribes of the French Guyana, and which belongs to the Canbboan family. One finds in it neither gender nor case; tho plural is oxpressed simply by the addition ofthc word pap o, signifyiug all, and serving at one and the same time for the noun as well_ as_ t~o verb. In this last part of a discourse, tho persons arc not d1scrmnnated; and tho same form acts in tho plural, no loss than in tho singular, for tho three persons. . American langua<res have, then, also passed through very d1fl'cront phases of dcvolopm~nt; but, even when they have attain~d, as in Quialwa and the Guarani, a remarkable degree of elaboratiOn, they have been unable, notwithstanding, to overcome the elementary -forms upon which they had boon scafiolded. In tho presence of such existing testimonies, of this gradual development, it becomes, henceforth, impossible to conc~ndo anything from those analogies signalized between AmorLCan and African languages, as regards imagined filiation. The aspect of two vast linguistic groups, placed at distances so remote, roig~1t lta:e engendered a supposition of some link~ o~ p1~oxirnatc L~clatton~lnp between tho populations speaking them, rf, m VICW of thmr pltyszque, tho Indians of tho New World, and the negroes and IIottcntots of Africa, were not so entirely di.lforent. But, seeing that we have established each :floor (etage) of linguistic civilization-if one may so speak-we cannot admit that these tongues ha_vo been transport d from Africa to America, or, at least, that th01r grammar alt·oady |