crowded on the two banks of the Klamath river and many more around the Sacramento, although these streams do not exceed in length, respectively, 250 and 400 miles. To produce or preserve so many small language families, totally distinct from each other in their radicals, these tribes must have lived during very long periods in a state of comparative isolation, and have remained almost untouched by foreign invaders, protected as they were by the sea coast, and by the high-towering wall of the snow-capped Sierra Nevada.
In the wide basin of the Upper Columbia river several tribes hunting the bear, buffalo, elk, deer and antelope, roam over the thinly populated prairies, and occupy enormous tracts of barren and sage-brush plains. Hunting tribes need a wide extent of territory, and when it is refused to them they will fight for it. Thus originate the constant wars of extermination among many of these tribes, and their encroachments over others in regard to territory. Of this we find the most conspicuous instances among the nomadic tribes roving between the Rocky Mountains and the Mississippi river.
In their morphological character the languages of America do not differ materially from the Asiatic tongues of agglutinative structure, except by their more developed power of polysynthetism. But in many of their number this faculty remains only in an embryonic state, and by dint of a far-going analysis, some of them approach the structure of our modern European analytic languages. Still, in a number of others, the incorporative tendency prevails in a high decree; they are synthetic as much as the Latin, Greek, or Gothic—many of them superlatively so. They use not only prefixes and affixes, as we do, but also infixes, viz: particles, or particle-fragments, inserted into the stem. As a general thing, American languages are not sex-denoting, though we find a distinction of sex in the dual of the Iroquois verb, and in some Central American verb-inflections, where he is distinguished from she in the personal pronoun. A true substantive verb to be is not not found in any American language,[1] and the word-stems have not undergone that process of thorough differentation between noun and verb which we observe in German, English, and French. These three languages we call accentuating, since the quantity of their syllables is of relative importance only, the influence of the accentuation being paramount. In many American languages we observe, on the contrary, that accent shifts from syllable to
- ↑ Full and detailed information concerning the structure prevailing in American languages, will be found in Prof. J.H. Trumbull's article on "Indian Languages," in Johnson's New Cyclopædia, vol. ii. New York, 1875.
