I think there is no doubt but that it points unmistakably to that very ancient, to that primordial period of human utterance when men had not yet learned to connect words into sentences, when their utmost efforts at articulate speech did not go beyond single words, which, aided by gestures and signs, served to convey their limited intellectual converse. Such single vocables did not belong to any particular part of speech. There was no grammar to that antique tongue. Its disconnected exclamations mean whole sentences in themselves.
A large part of the human race, notably, but not exclusively, the aborigines of this continent, continued the tradition of this mode of expression in the structure of their tongues long after the union of thought and sound in audible speech had been brought to a high degree of perfection.
Although I thus regard one of the most prominent peculiarities of American languages as a survival from an exceedingly low stage of human development, it by no means follows that this is an evidence of their inferiority.
The Chinese, who made no effort to combine the primitive vocables into one, but range them nakedly side by side, succeeded no better than the American Indians; and there is not much beyond assertion to prove that the Aryans, who, through their inflections, marked the relation of each word in the sentence by numerous tags of case, gender, number, etc., got any nearer the ideal perfection of language.
If we apply what is certainly a very fair test, to wit: the uses to which a language is and can be put, I cannot see that a well-developed American tongue, such as the Aztec or the Algonkin, in any way falls short of, say French or English.
It is true that in many of these tongues there is no distinction made between expressions, which with us are carefully separated, and are so in thought. Thus, in the Tupi of Brazil and elsewhere, there is but one word for the three expressions, “his father,” “he is a father,” and “he has a father;” in many, the simple form of the verb may convey three different ideas, as in Ute, where the word for “he seizes” means also “the seizer,” and as a descriptive noun, “a bear,” the animal which seizes.
This has been charged against these languages as a lack of “differentiation.” Grammatically this is so, but the same charge applies with almost equal force to the English language, where the same word may belong to any of four, five, even six parts of speech, dependent entirely on the connection in which it is used.
As a set-off, the American languages avoid confusions of expression which prevail in European tongues.
Thus in none of these latter, when I say “the love of God,” “l’amour de Dieu,” “amor Dei,” can you understand what I mean. You do not know whether I intend the love which we have or should have toward God, or God’s love toward us. Yet in the Mexican language (and many other American tongues) these two quite opposite ideas are so clearly distinguished that, as Father Carochi warns his readers in his Mexican Grammar, to confound them would not merely be a grievous solecism in speech, but a formidable heresy as well.
Another example. What can you make out of this sentence, which is strictly correct by English grammar: “John told Robert’s son that he must help him”? You can make nothing out of it. It may have any one of six different meanings, depending on the persons referred to by the pronouns “he” and “him.” No such lamentable confusion could occur in any American tongue known to me. The Chippeway, for instance, has three pronouns of the third person, which designate the near and the remote antecedents with the most lucid accuracy.