[717] Dr. Farrar, referring to the Basque, says: “What is certain about it is, that its structure is polysynthetic, like the language of America. Like them, and them only, it habitually forms its compounds by the elimination of certain radicals in the simple words; so that, e. g., ilhun, twilight, is contracted from hill, dead, and egun, day; and belhaun, the knee, from belhar, front, and oin, leg. It was this fact that made Larramendi give to his treatise on Basque grammar the title of ‘The Impossible Overcome.’ The most daring of all the hypotheses which have been suggested points to the conceivable existence of some great Atlantis; to the possibility of the ‘Basque area being the remains of a vast system, of which Madeira and the Azores are fragments belonging to the Miocene period.’ Be this as it may, the fact is indisputable and is eminently noteworthy that, while the affinities of the Basque roots have never been conclusively elucidated, there has never been any doubt that this isolated language, preserving its identity in a western corner of Europe between two mighty kingdoms, resembles in its grammatical structure the aboriginal languages of the vast opposite continent, and those alone.”—Families of Speech, pp. 132–3. Also see Alfred Maury in Nott and Gliddon’s Indigenous Races of the Earth, p. 48.
[718] See Maury in Nott and Gliddon’s Indig. Races, pp. 81–84.
[719] Salisbury’s Le Plongeon in Yucatan, p. 96.
[720] See on the Maya, Ruz, Gram. Yucateca; Pimentel, Quadro Leng. Indig., tom. ii, pp. 5 et seq., whose grammar we have followed above. Also vol. ii, pp. 119, 221; vol. i, p. 229, for idioms; Gallatin in Am. Ethnol. Soc. Transact., vol. i, pp. 252 et seq.; Vater, Mithridates. tom. iii, pt. iii, pp. 4–24; Brasseur de Bourbourg, Grammaire in Landa’s Relacion, pp. 459 et seq., also Maya and French Vocabulary; Bancroft, Native Races, vol. iii, pp. 759–82, quotes prayer as above. Further see literature cited in Ludewig’s Literature of American Aboriginal Languages, ed. of Trübner. London, 1858, pp. 102–3.
[721] Full accounts of the grammatical structure of the languages of this family may be found in Pimentel’s Quadro, tom. i, pp. 35–78, 321–60; Orozco y Berra’s Geografía, pp. 25 et seq.; Bancroft’s Native Races, vol. iii, pp. 748–58.
[722] Ixtlilxochitl, Hist. Chic. in Kingsborough’s Mex. Antiq., vol. ix, p. 217, and cited by Bancroft, Native Races, vol. iii, p. 724.
[723] Native Races, vol. iii, pp. 724–5; Pimentel, Quadro Leng. Indig. de Mex., tom. i, pp. 154–8, and our discussion in this work, chapter vi. p. 255.
[724] Native Races, vol. iii, pp. 726–7. The same author refers to the Natural History of Dr. Hernandez, written in the Aztec, as proof of its copiousness. “Twelve hundred different species of Mexican plants, two hundred or more species of birds, and a large number of quadrupeds, reptiles, insects and metals, each of which is given its proper name in the Mexican language.” (Quoted by Pimentel, Quadro., vol. i, p. 168.)
[725] See Prescott’s Conq. of Mex., vol. i, p. 174 (ed. of 1875). “Tezcuco,” says Boturini, “where the noblemen sent their sons to acquire the most polished dialect of the Nahuatlac language, and to study poetry, moral philosophy, the heathen theology, astronomy, medicine and history.” (Idea, p. 142, cited by Prescott.)
[726] Geografía de las Lenguas, p. 9.