There is another point that I must mention in this connection, because I find that it has almost always been overlooked or misunderstood by critics of these languages. These have been free in condemning the synthetic forms of construction. But they seem to be ignorant that their use is largely optional. Thus, in Mexican, one can arrange the same sentence in an analytic or a synthetic form, and this is also the case, in a less degree, in the Algonkin. By this means a remarkable richness is added to the language. The higher the grade of synthesis employed, the more striking, elevated, and pointed becomes the expression. In common life long compounds are rare, while in the native Mexican poetry each line is often but one word.
Turning now from the structure of these languages to their vocabularies, I must correct a widespread notion that they are scanty in extent and deficient in the means to express lofty or abstract ideas.
Of course, there are many tracts of thought and learning familiar to us now which were utterly unknown to the American aborigines, and not less so to our own forefathers a few centuries ago. It would be very unfair to compare the dictionary of an Indian language with the last edition of Webster’s Unabridged. But take the English dictionaries of the latter half of the sixteenth century, before Spenser and Shakespeare wrote, and compare them with the Mexican vocabulary of Molina, which contains about 13,000 words, or with the Maya vocabulary of the convent of Motul, which presents over 20,000, both prepared at that date, and your procedure will be just, and you will find it not disadvantageous to the American side of the question.
The deficiency in abstract terms is generally true of these languages. They did not have them, because they had no use for them,—and the more blessed was their condition. European languages have been loaded with several thousand such by metaphysics and mysticism, and it has required several generations to discover that they are empty wind-bags, full of sound and signifying nothing.
Yet it is well known to students that the power of forming abstracts is possessed in a remarkable degree by many native languages. The most recondite formulæ of dogmatic religion, such as the definition of the Trinity and the difference between consubstantiation and transubstantiation, have been translated into many of them without introducing foreign words, and in entire conformity with their grammatical structure. Indeed, Dr. Augustin de la Rosa, of the University of Guadalajara, who is now the only living professor of any American language, says the Mexican is peculiarly adapted to render these metaphysical subtleties.
I have been astonished that some writers should bring up the primary meaning of a word in an American language in order to infer the coarseness of its secondary meaning. This is a strangely unfair proceeding, and could be directed with equal effect against our own tongues. Thus, I read lately a traveller who spoke hardly of an Indian tribe because their word for “to love” was a derivative from that meaning “to buy,” and thence “to prize.” But what did the Latin amare, and the English to love, first mean? Carnally living together is what they first meant, and this is not a nobler derivation than that of the Indian. Even yet, when the most polished of European nations, that one which most exalts la grande passion, does not distinguish in language between loving their wives and liking their dinners, but uses the same word for both emotions, it is scarcely wise for us to indulge in much latitude of inference from such etymologies.
Such is the general character of American languages, and such are the reasons why they should be preserved and studied. The field is vast and demands many laborers to reap all the fruit that it promises. It is believed at present that there are about two hundred wholly independent stocks of languages among the aborigines of this continent. They vary most widely in vocabulary, and seemingly scarcely less so in grammar.
Besides this, each of these stocks is subdivided into dialects, each distinguished by its own series of phonetic changes, and its own new words. What an opportunity is thus offered for the study of the natural evolution of language, unfettered by the petrifying art of writing!
In addition to these native dialects there are the various jargons which have sprung up by intercourse with the Spanish, English, Dutch, Portuguese, and French settlers. These are by no means undeserving of notice. They reveal in an instructive manner the laws of the influence which is exerted on one another by languages of radically different formations. A German linguist of eminence, Prof. Schuchardt, of Gratz, has for years devoted himself to the study of the mixed languages of the globe, and his results promise to be of the first order of importance for linguistic science. In America we find examples of such in the Chinook jargon of the Pacific coast, the Jarocho of Mexico, the “Maya mestizado“ of Yucatan, the ordinary Lingoa Geral of Brazil, and the Nahuatl-Spanish of Nicaragua, in which last mentioned jargon, a curious medley of Mexican and low Spanish, I have lately published a comedy as written and acted by the natives and half-castes of that country.
All such macaroni dialects must come into consideration, if we wish to make a full representation of the linguistic riches of this continent.