How, then, in spite of such tenacity of American languages, have so many stocks come into existence? This was the question which my predecessor in this chair last year undertook to answer. His suggestions appear to me extremely valuable, and only in one point do I widely differ from him, and that is, in the length of time required for these numerous tongues to originate, to sever into dialects and to be carried to distant regions.[[21]] According to the able linguist, Dr. Stoll, the difference which is presented between the Cakchiquel and Maya dialects could not have arisen in less than two thousand years;[[22]] and any one who has carefully compared the earliest grammars of an American tongue with its present condition will acknowledge that the changes are surprisingly few. To me the exceeding diversity of languages in America and the many dialects into which these have split, are cogent proofs of the vast antiquity of the race, an antiquity stretching back tens of thousands of years. Nothing less can explain these multitudinous forms of speech.
Underlying all these varied forms of expression, however, I think future investigation will demonstrate some curious identities of internal form, traits almost or entirely peculiar to American languages, and never quite absent from any of them.
Such was the opinion of the two earliest philosophical investigators of these tongues, P. S. Duponceau and Wilhelm von Humboldt. They called these traits polysynthesis and incorporation, and it was proposed to apply the term incorporative as a distinguishing adjective to all American languages. Of late years this opinion has been earnestly combatted by M. Lucien Adam and others; but my own studies have led me to adopt the views of the older analysts against these modern critics. I do not think that the student can compare any two stocks on the continent without being impressed with the resemblance of their expression of the relations of Being, through the incorporative plan.
Along with this identity of plan, there coëxists the utmost independence of expression. An American language is usually perfectly transparent. Nothing is easier than to reduce it to its ultimate elements, its fundamental radicals. These are few in numbers and interjectional in character. The Athapascan, the Algonkin, whose wide extension I have referred to, have been reduced to half a dozen particles or sounds expressive of the simplest conceptions.[[23]] Upon these, by combination, repetition, imitation and other such processes, the astonishing structure of the tongue has been erected, every portion of it displaying the mechanism of its origin. It is this transparency which renders these tongues so attractive to the philosophic student of human expression, and so valuable to him who would obtain from them the record of the progress of the nation.
A thorough study of such a language would embrace its material, its formal and its psychologic contents. Its material elements include the peculiarities of its vocabulary: for example, its numerals and the system they indicate, its words for weights and measures, for color and direction, for relations of consanguinity and affinity, for articles of use and ornament, for social and domestic conditions, and the like.
Few studies of American languages go beyond this material or lexicographic limit; but in truth these are merely the externalities of a tongue, and have nothing to do with linguistic science proper. This concerns itself with the forms of the language, with the relation of parts of speech to each other and to the sentence, and with the historical development of the grammatical categories. Beyond this, again, is the determination of the psychical character of the tribe through the forms instinctively adopted for the expression of its thoughts, and reciprocally the reaction exerted by these forms on the later intellectual growth of those who were taught them as their only means of articulate expression.
These are data of the highest value in the study of prehistoric time; but so far as America is concerned, I could name very few scholars who have pursued this promising line of research.
Physical. Much more attention has been paid to the physical than the linguistic data of the native Americans, but it may freely be said, with not more satisfactory results. This failure is partly owing to the preconceived notions which still govern the study of ethnology. Linnæus offered the cautious division of the human species into races named from the five great geographical areas it inhabited; Blumenbach pointed out that this roughly corresponded with the division into five colors, the white, black, yellow, brown and red races, occupying respectively Europe, Africa, Asia, Polynesia and America. Unfortunately, Cuvier chose to simplify this scheme, by merging the brown and red races, the Polynesian or Malayan and the American, into the yellow or Mongolian. The latest writers of the French school, and I am sorry to add various Americans, servilely follow this groundless rejection of the older scheme, and speak of Malayans and Americans alike as Mongolians or Mongoloids. Neither in language nor ethnic anatomy is there any more resemblance than between whites and Mongolians.
It is gratifying to see that the more accurate German investigators decidedly reject the blunder of Cuvier, and declare that the American race is as independent as any other of those named. Thus Dr. Paul Ehrenreich, who has lately published an admirable monograph on the Botocudos of Brazil, a tribe often quoted for its so-called “Mongoloid” aspect, declares that any such assertion must be contradicted in positive terms. Both in osteology and anatomy, in formation of the hair and shape of the skull, the differences are marked, permanent and radical.
What is true of the Botocudos is not less so of the other American tribes which are claimed to present Mongolian traits. Such assertions are based on the superficial observations of travellers, most of whom do not know the first principles of ethnic anatomy. This is sufficiently shown by the importance they attach to the oblique eye, a slight malformation of the skin of scarcely any weight.[[24]]