In ([5]) I have examined the various alleged affiliations between American and Asiatic tongues, and showed they are wholly unfounded.
In ([7]) I have entered a plea for more attention to American languages. Not only for ethnographic purposes are they useful, but their primitive aspects and methods of presenting ideas enable us to solve psychological and grammatic problems more completely than other tongues.
In support of this, in ([9]) and ([10]), I endeavor to outline what must have been the morphology of the language which man spoke when in the very beginning of his existence as man; a speech of marvelous simplicity, but adapted to his wants.
The volume, of nearly four hundred pages, entitled The American Race (No. [11]) was the first attempt at a systematic classification of all the tribes of America, North, Central and South, on the basis of language. It defines seventy-nine linguistic stocks in North America and sixty-one in South America. The number of tribes named and referred to these stocks is nearly sixteen hundred. Several of these stocks are defined for the first time, such as the Tequistlatecan of Mexico, the Matagalpan of Central America, and in South America the Timote, the Paniquita, the Cocanuca, the Mocoa, the Betoya, the Lamuca, etc.
In the article ([8]) I show that, contrary to an oft expressed opinion, the rate of change in these unwritten tongues is remarkably slow, not greater than in cultivated languages.
When the publishers of the Standard Dictionary (New York, 1895) were preparing that well-known work, they placed in my hands all the words in the English language derived from the native tongues of America. Although the etymology of some of them remains obscure, I believe the derivation of all positively traced will be found presented.
I early became convinced that the translations of books of devotion, etc., into the native tongues gave no correct impression of those tongues. The ideas conveyed were foreign to the primitive mind, and the translations were generally by foreigners who had not completely mastered the idioms. Hence, the only true reflex of a language is in the words and thoughts of the natives themselves, in their indigenous literature.
This led me to project the publication of a series of volumes containing writings, preferably on secular subjects, by natives in their own languages. That there is such a literature I undertook to show in ([13]) and ([14]). The former was the expansion of a paper presented to the International Congress of Americanists at Copenhagen. It contains a list of native American authors and notices of a number of their works composed in their own tongues. That on “aboriginal poetry” vindicates for native American bards a respectable position among lyric and dramatic composers.
That some of the central subjects of poetic literature—the emotions of love and friendship—exist, and often in no low form of sentiment, among these natives, I have undertaken to show by an analysis of a number of terms expressing these feelings in five leading American linguistic stocks, the Algonkin, Nahuatl, Maya, Quechua and Tupi (No. [15]).
Following out this plan, I began in 1882 the publication of “The Library of Aboriginal American Literature.” Each volume was to contain a work composed in a native tongue by a native; but those based upon foreign inspiration, such as sermons, etc., were to be excluded. Each was to be translated and edited with sufficient completeness to make it available for the general student.