Philadelp , 13th July, 1816.
Dear Sir.—I have received your kind letters of the 20th and 24th ult. It is impossible to be more clear, precise, and accurate, than you are in your answers to my various questions. The information which your letters contain is of the highest interest to me, and I doubt not will prove so to the Committee, by whose orders I have engaged in this Correspondence, on a subject entirely new to me, but with which I hope in time and with your able assistance, to become better acquainted.
M. de Volney has said somewhere in his excellent Descriptive View of the United States, that it were to be wished that five or six eminent linguists should be constantly employed at the public expense to compile Indian Grammars and Dictionaries. I cannot suppose that the Count meant literally what he said, as he must have been sensible of the difficulties attending on the execution of such a plan, but at any rate, here is a noble display of enthusiasm for our favourite science, and a sufficient encouragement for us to pursue our philological enquiries. Alas! if the beauties of the Lenni Lenape language were found in the ancient Coptic, or in some ante-diluvian Babylonish dialect, how would the learned of Europe be at work to display them in a variety of shapes and raise a thousand fanciful theories on that foundation! What superior wisdom, talents and knowledge would they not ascribe to nations whose idioms were formed with so much skill and method! But who cares for the poor American Indians? They are savages and barbarians and live in the woods; must not their languages be savage and barbarous like them?
Thus reason those pretended philosophers who court fame by writing huge volumes on the origin of human language, without knowing, perhaps, any language but their own, and the little Latin and Greek that they have been taught at College. You would think, when you read their works, that they had lived in the first ages of the creation and had been intimately acquainted with the family of our first parents. They know exactly what words were first uttered when men began to communicate their ideas to each other by means of articulated sounds; they can tell you how the various parts of speech, in perfect regular order, were successively formed, and with a little encouragement, they would, I have no doubt, compile a Grammar and Dictionary of the primitive language, as one Psalmanazar did once in England of a supposed Formosan tongue. It is a pity, indeed, that the Delawares, the Wyandots and the Potowatamies, with languages formed on a construction which had not been before thought of, come to destroy their beautiful theories. What then? are we to suppress the languages of our good Indians, or to misrepresent them, that the existing systems on Universal Grammar and the origin of language may be preserved? No, my friend, we shall on the contrary, I hope, labour with all our might to make them known, and provide, at least, additional facts for future theorists.
I have been led into this chain of ideas by reading the ponderous work of a Scotch Lord named Monboddo, who has dreamt of languages more than any other writer that I know. On the authority of a Father Sagard, (a French Missionary) he represents the language of the Hurons as the most incoherent and unsystematical heap of vocables that can possibly be conceived. Their words have no regular formation or derivation, no roots or radical syllables, there is no analogy whatever in the construction or arrangement of this language. He says, for instance, that there is a word for “two years” entirely different from those which signify one, three, four or ten years; that “hut,” “my hut,” and “in my hut,” are severally expressed by words entirely different from each other. He adduces several other examples of the same kind, with which I shall not trouble you, and concludes with saying, that “the Huron language is the most imperfect of any that has been yet discovered.” (Orig. of Lang., Vol. I., p. 478.)
Before we proceed further, let us suppose that a Huron or a Delaware is writing a treatise on the origin of language, and in the pride of pompous ignorance attempts to make similar observations on the English idiom. Following Lord Monboddo’s course of reasoning, he will say: “The English is the most imperfect language upon earth, for its words have no kind of analogy to each other. They say, for instance, ‘a house,’ and the things that belong to a house they call ‘domestic.’ They say ‘a year,’ and ‘an annual payment,’ for a sum of money payable every year. That is not all; if the payment is to be made in two years, it is then called biennial, in which you find no trace of either the word two or the word ‘year,’ of which in a regular language it should be compounded. What belongs to a King is royal; to a woman, feminine; to ship, naval; to a town, urban; to the country, rural. Such another irregular, unmethodical dialect never existed, I believe, on the back of the great tortoise!!”
Such would be the language of our Huron philosopher, and he would be about as right as Lord Monboddo. I have read this work of Father Sagard, of which there is a copy in the Congress library. It appears to me that the good Father was an honest, well meaning, but most ignorant friar, of one of the mendicant orders. His residence among the Hurons was very short, not more than a twelve-month; he was, I know not for what reason, called home by his superiors, and left America with great regret. He has collected a number of words and phrases of the Huron language in the form of a vocabulary, which he improperly calls a dictionary. I have had it copied and shall shew it to you when you come to town. You will be satisfied when you see it, that the good man not only never analysed the language of the Hurons, but was incapable of doing it. He was perfectly bewildered in the variety of its forms, and drew the very common conclusion that what he could not comprehend was necessarily barbarous and irregular. From an attentive perusal of his “dictionary,” I am inclined to draw the opposite conclusion from that which he has drawn. There appears to me to be in it sufficient internal evidence to shew that the Huron language is rich in grammatical forms, and that it is constructed much on the same plan with the Delaware. I shall be very glad to have your opinion on it, with such information as you are able and willing to give. I beg particularly that you will let me know whether there are roots and derivations in the Indian languages, analogous to those of our own?
I am, &c.
LETTER XIII.
TO MR. HECKEWELDER.
Philadelphia, 18th July, 1816.