LINGUISTIC APPENDIX
The linguistic classification of the American tribes is at present imperfect in many regions on account of the incomplete information about their tongues. A proper comparison of languages or dialects includes not merely the vocabulary, but the grammatical forms and the phonetic variations which the vocal elements undergo in passing from one form of speech to another. In some respects, the morphology is more indicative of relationship than the lexicon of tongues; and it is in these grammatical aspects that we are peculiarly poorly off when we approach American dialects. Yet it is also likely that the tendency of late years has been to underestimate the significance of merely lexical analogies. The vocabulary, after all, must be our main stand-by in such an undertaking.
For that reason I have thought it worth while to bring together a short list of common words and show their renderings in a number of American tongues. Inasmuch as the languages north of Mexico—those in the United States and Canada—have been frequently studied and are readily accessible in published books, I have confined my specimens to the tongues of the central and southern regions of the continent.
The words I have selected for the vocabulary are those which I think would be most likely to indicate relationship, when such existed. But as every comparative linguist is aware, neither these nor any words are free from the risk of ambiguity and equivocation. Thus, in many languages there are two or three different terms for “man,” as homo, vir or male; “woman” is wife or female; “sun” and “moon” are often merely descriptive terms or synonyms of day, light, night and darkness; the parts of the body have in American tongues the personal possessive noun prefixed or suffixed; what is worse, the terms for such may differ with the person, as in Kechua, where the word for “eye,” “arm,” etc., differ as it is my or thy eye, etc. “Hand” and “arm,” “foot” and “leg,” are frequently not discriminated, the corresponding words meaning properly “upper extremity,” “lower extremity,” etc.; and so on for almost every word that could be chosen.
The proper inference to draw from these facts is, not that a comparison of vocabularies is worthless or nearly so, but just the contrary. Where we find that a short vocabulary, imperfect for the above reasons, and still more so for the general ignorance of linguistics on the part of collectors, and the varying values they give to the alphabets employed, yet reveals identities with others, we are justly authorized to consider such analogies as highly significant and suggestive of profounder comparisons.