particular and general. The exclusive plural, in certain dialects,
applies itself to the orator, and to the community to which he
belongs, by excluding the others ; whereas, in sundry dialects, this
same plural applies 'to those in whose name one speaks, to the
exclusion of the persons to whom one is addressing a discourse.
One trait of the grammar of American languages, that has greatly
struck the first Europeans who sought to grasp their rules, is what
they have called transition. This process, otherwise intimately connected
with polysynthetism, consists in dissolving the pronoun indicative
of the subject,—no less than that one indicating the object,—
into the verb, so as to compose but a single word. Hence it follows
that no verb can be employed without its governing case {régime).
The number of these transitions varies according to the languages,
and the pronoun incorporates itself with the verb generally by suffixes.
By means of a modification of the principal radical, American
tongues arrive at rendering all the accessory or derived notions that
attach themselves to the idea of verb. Hence arises a vast number
of voies. These changes constitute all the riches of the Hew 'World’s
idioms. This abundance of changes is above all striking in the Algonquin,
and in DahJcota,—the language of an important Sioux tribe.
On the contrary, in the Moxo,—a tongue of South America, the conjugations
reduce themselves to one. Here o we have a new trait of
resemblance between the idioms of Africa and those of the Hew
World.
A classification of American languages has been attempted. It is
a difficult undertaking ; because, in general, amid populations that
live by tribes exceedingly fracted, and in a savage state, words
become extremely altered in passing from one tribe to another. Hew
words are created with great facility ; and were one to take but the
differences into account, it might be believed that these languages
are fundamentally distinct. The erudite Swiss, long a distinguished
citizen of the Hnited States—successor, in philology, to a learned
Franco-American, D u p o n c e a u— M r . G a l l a t i n , has found in Horth
America alone some 37 families of tongues, comprising more than
100 dialects ; and even then he was far from having exhausted all
the idioms of that portion of the world. It is true that he embraces,
witbin his classification, the JEskimaux and Athapascan idioms, which
appertain, as well as certainly the former race, to the Ougro-Finnic
stock,—otherwise termed the boreal branch. Among Horth American
families, those of the Algonquin, Iroquois, Cherokee, Choctaw and
Sioux, are the most important; but, Concerning the indigenous
tongues spoken around the Rios, Gila and Colorado, philological
science hitherto possesses only vague information.
At the centre of America we meet with four families, viz : the
family Quicho-Maya, of which the chief representatives are the idioms
of Yucatan;—the second family is exhibited in the Otomi, which at
first had been erroneously made a completely separate type,—the
third is the Lenca family, principally spread over the territory of
Honduràs,— and lastly, the fourth family is represented by the
Nahuatl, otherwise called the ancient Mexican ; of which we possess
literary monuments written in a kind of hieroglyphics.
The Quichen, or Quichoa—language of the Incas—comprehends
several dialects, of which the principal is the Aymara. The Quichoa,
of all the families of the Hew World, possesses most prominently the
polysynthetical character. The Guarani family, to which the Chilian
attaches itself, manifests a very great grammatical development. It
was spread throughout the south and east of austral America, and
was spoken over a vast expanse of territory. Finally, the two families,
the Pampean or Moxo, and the Cardib, occupy, in the hierarchical
ladder of American idioms, the very lowest rungs. In these there
is excessive simplicity,—for instance, in the Galibi, spoken by savage
tribes of the French Guyana, and which belongs to the Caribbean
family. One finds in it neither gender nor case; the plural is expressed
simply by the addition of the word p ap o, signifying all, and
serving at one and the same time for the noun as well as the verb.
In this last part of a discourse, the persons are not discriminated ;
and the same form acts in the plural, no less than in the singular,
for the three persons.
American languages have, then, also passed through very different
phases of development; but, even when they have attained, as in
Quichoa and the Guarani, a remarkable degree of elaboration, they
have been unable, notwithstanding, to overcome the elementaiy
forms upon which they had been scaffolded.
In the presence of such existing testimonies, of this gradual
development, it becomes, henceforth, impossible to conclude anything
from those analogies signalized between American and
African languages, as regards imagined filiation. The aspect of
two vast linguistic groups, placed at distances so remote, might have
engendered a supposition of some links of proximate relationship
between the populations speaking them, if, in view of their physique,
Aftn- 8 °f the WeW World’ and the negroes and Hottentots of
Atnca, were not so entirely different. But, seeing that we haVe
es shed each floor {étage) of linguistic civilization—if one may so
fr 6a 7 Z * Cannot adndt that these tongues have been transported
m ca to America, or, at least, that their grammar already