PREFATORY LETTER. O some of their nasal vowels, have no equivalent, and cannot be expressed with our characters, as used by the French or English. The perpetual substitution for each other of per mutable consonants, the numerous mod- ifications of which vocal sounds are susceptible, and the various ways in which we express them, even in our own languages, have been fruit- ful sources of the diversified manner in which the same word is spelled by the European hearers. It requires some practice before you learn how to decipher those varieties. The habit is, however, acquired by comparing together the several vocabularies of the same language, and of two or more dialects previously ascertained to be only varieties of the same tongue. It is proper here to add, that there are nations known by a generic name, but spread over an extensive territory, without being united under a common government, such as the Knistinaux and the Chippeways ; of whom it may be said that they have, properly speaking, no general uniform language, but, as might be naturally expected, a number of patois, differing in some respects from each other, but still so nearly allied, that they are mutually understood without interpreters. Whenever this is the case, we consider them as the same dialect. The number of families, of distinct languages, and of dialects, does not appear to be greater in North America, than is found amongst unciv- ilized nations in other quarters of the globe, or than might have been expected to grow out of the necessity for nations in the hunter state to separate, and gradually to form independent communities. Insulated remnants of ancient languages are also found, not only in Asia, as in the Caucasian mountains, but even in Europe, such as the Basque. The difficulty of accounting for that diversity, is the same here as in the other continent; and there is nothing that I can perceive, in the number of the American languages and in the great differences between them, inconsistent with the Mosaic chronology. Amidst that great diversity of American languages, considered only in reference to their vocabularies, the similarity of their structure and grammatical forms has been observed and pointed out by the American philologists. The substance of our knowledge in that respect will be found in a condensed form in the Appendix. The result appears to confirm the opinions already entertained on that subject by Mr. Du Pon- ceau, Mr. Pickering, and others; and to prove that all the languages, not only of our own Indians, but of the native inhabitants of America from the Arctic Ocean to Cape Horn,* have, as far as they have been
- The grammar of the language of Chili is the only one, foreign to the
immediate object of the Synopsis, with which a comparison has been intro- duced in this essay. Want of space did not permit to extend the inquiry to the languages of Mexico and other parts of Spanish America.
