| OCR Text |
Show i9oo] CLASSIFICATION OP INDIANS continent. The languages of North America in general are highly v agglutinative^. Suffixes, prefixes, and parts of speech are~ added to the verb to a bewildering degree, and all the terms of any sentence tend to be brought together into a single word, in most cases the verb with which subject and object have been incorporated. These common characteristics do not prevent, however, a very wide diversity, not only in the vocabularies, but in the structures and morphologies of the different American languages. Much attention has been and is being given to the analysis of the Indian tongues. Tentative classifications of linguistic families have been made, based upon inspection and comparison of vocabularies, and fortunately are for the most part sustained by comparisons based on syntax. When such comparison shows that the resemblances between two languages are not sufficient to indicate a common origin or undeniable relation, the two groups are regarded as independent stocks or families. The exact number of such stocks in North America it is at present impossible to state, but it is probably about seventy- five. It must be remembered that each of these stocks may, and in most cases does, speak many dialects so different as to be mutually unintelligible, even though grammatically related. The distribution of stock languages also varies widely, some extending nearly across the continent and embracing hundreds of divisions, while |
