ago; that, though it has been since penetrated and pressed on every side by cultivated nations, the efforts made to collect and preserve information respecting it have been only spasmodic and fragmentary; that it is almost wholly destitute of literature, and even of traditions of any authority and value; and that great numbers of its constituent members have perished, in the wasting away of the tribes by mutual warfare, by pestilence and famine, and by the encroachments of more powerful races—and it will be clearly seen that the comprehensive comparative study of American languages is beset with very great difficulties.
Yet it is the confident opinion of linguistic scholars that a fundamental unity lies at the base of all these infinitely varying forms of speech; that they may be, and probably are, all descended from a single parent language.[1] For, whatever their differences of material, there is a single type or plan upon which their forms are developed and their constructions made, from the Arctic Ocean to Cape Horn; and one sufficiently peculiar and distinctive to constitute a genuine indication of relationship. This type is called the incorporative or polysynthetic. It tends to the excessive and abnormal agglomeration of distinct significant elements in its words; whereby, on the one hand, cumbrous compounds are formed as the names of objects, and a character of tedious and timewasting polysyllabism is given to the language—see, for example, the three to ten-syllabled numeral and pronominal words of our western Indian tongues; or the Mexican name for 'goat,' kwa-kwauh tentsone, literally 'head-tree (horn)-lip-hair (beard),’ or 'the horned and bearded one'—and, on the other hand, and what is of yet more importance, an unwieldy aggregation, verbal or quasi-verbal, is substituted
- ↑ I make no account here of isolated dialects of an exceptional character, like the Otomi in central Mexico, which is asserted to be a monosyllabic language; nor of others which may exhibit the characteristic features of American speech so faintly, or in such a modified form, as to be hardly recognizable by their structure as American: it remains yet to be determined whether such seeming exceptions do or do not admit of explanation as the result of special historical development. Nor, of course, is the possibility denied that fuller knowledge will bring to light tongues radically and irreconcilably discordant from the general type.
