I. In the Algonkin, as I gather from the professor's explanations, there is one form of the word "love" from which are derived the expressions "to tie," "to fasten," "and also some of the coarsest words to express the sexual relation." For the feebler "sentiment" of merely liking a person there is a word meaning "he or it seems good to me." Expressions relating to the highest form of love, "that which embraces all men and all beings" are derived from a root indicative of "what gives joy." The italics are mine. I can find here no indication of altruistic sentiment, but quite the reverse.
II. It was among the Mexicans that Dr. Brinton found the "delicate" poems. Yet he informs us that they had "only one word…to express every variety of love, human and divine, carnal and chaste, between men and between the sexes." This being the case, how are we ever to know which kind of love a Mexican poem refers to? Dr. Brinton himself feels that one must not credit the Aztecs "with finer feelings than they deserve;" and with reference to a certain mythic conception he adds, "I gravely doubt that they felt the shafts of the tender passion, with any such susceptibility as to employ this metaphor." Moreover, as he informs us, the Mexican root of the word is not derived from the primary meaning of the root, but from a secondary and later signification. "This hints ominously," he says,
"at the probability that the ancient tongue had for a long time no word at all to express this, the highest and noblest emotion of the human heart, and that consequently this emotion itself had not risen to consciousness in the national mind."
In its later development the capacity of the language for emotional expression was greatly enlarged. Was this before the European missionaries appeared on the scene? Missionaries, it is important to remember, had a good deal to do with the development of the language, as well as the birth of the nobler conceptions and emotions among the lower races. Many fatal blunders in comparative psychology and sociology can be traced to the ignoring of this fact.
III. Dr. Otto Stoll, in his work Zur Ethnographie der Rep. Guatemala, declares that the Cakchiquel Indians of that country "are strangers to the mere conception of that kind of love which is expressed by the Latin verb amare." Logoh, the Guatemalan word for love, also means "to buy," and according to Stoll the only other word in the pure original tongue for the passion of love is ah, to want, to desire. Dr. Brinton finds it used also in the sense of "to like," "to love" [in what way?]. But the best he can do is to "think that 'to buy' and 'to love' may be construed as developments of the same idea of prizing highly" which tells us nothing regarding altruism. All that we know about the customs of Guatemalans points to the conclusion that Dr. Stoll was right in declaring that they had no notion of true love.
IV. Of the Peruvian expressions relating to love in the comprehensive sense of the word, Dr. Brinton specifies five. Of one of them, munay, there were, according to Dr. Anchorena, nearly six hundred combinations. It meant originally "merely a sense of want, an appetite, and the accompanying desire to satisfy it." In songs composed in the nineteenth century cenyay, which originally meant pity, is preferred to munay as the most appropriate term for the love between the sexes. The blind, unreasoning, absorbing passion is expressed by huaylluni, which is nearly always confined to sexual love, and "conveys the idea of the sentiment showing itself in action by those sweet signs and marks of devotion which are so highly prized by the loving heart." The verb lluyllny (literally to be soft or tender, as fruit) means to
"love with tenderness, to have as a darling, to caress lovingly. It has less of sexuality in it than the word last mentioned, and is applied by girls to each other and as a term of family fondness."
There was also a term, mayhuay, referring to words of tenderness or acts of endearment which may be merely simulated signs of emotion. I cannot find in any of these definitions evidence of altruistic affection, unless it be in the "marks of devotion," which expression, however, I suspect, is Philadelphian rather than Peruvian.
V. The Tupi-Guarani have one word only to express all the varieties of love known to them—aihu. Dr. Brinton thinks he "cannot be far wrong" in deriving this from ai, self, or the same, and hu to find or be present; and from this he infers that "to love," in Guarani, means "to find oneself in another," or "to discover in another a likeness to oneself." I submit that this is altogether too airy a fabric of fanciful conjecture to allow the inference that the sentiment of love was known to these Brazilian Indians, whose morals and customs were, moreover, as we have seen, fatal obstacles to the growth of refined sexual feeling. Both the Tupis and Guaranis were cannibals, and they had no regard for chastity. One of their "sentimental" customs was for a captor to make his prisoner, before he was eaten, cohabit with his (the captor's) sister or daughter, the offspring of this union being allowed to grow up and then was devoured too, the first mouthful being given to the mother. (Southey, I., 218.) I mention this because Dr. Brinton says that the evidence that the sentiment of love was awake among these tribes "is corroborated by the incidents we learn of their domestic life."
[246] U.S. Geogr. and Geol Survey Rocky Mt. Region, Pt. I., 181-89.