Man and His Migrations

by R. G. Latham

Our plan is now to take up the different lines of migration at the points where they were respectively broken off. This was at their different points of contact with Asia. The first line was—

I. The American.—In affiliating the American with the Asiatic, the ethnologist is in the position of an irrigator, who supplies some wide tract of thirsty land with water derived from a higher level, but kept from the parts below by artificial embankments. These he removes; his process being simple but effectual, and wholly independent of the clever machinery of pumps, water-wheels, and similar branches of hydraulics. The obstacle being taken away, gravitation does the rest.

The over-valuation of the Eskimo peculiarities is the great obstacle in American ethnology. When these are cut down to their due level, the connexion between America and Asia is neither more nor less than one of the clearest we have. It is certainly clearer than the junction of Africa and north-western Asia; not more obscure than that between Oceanica and the Transgangetic Peninsula; and incalculably less mysterious than that which joins Asia to Europe.

Indeed, there is no very great break, either philologically or anatomically, until we reach the confines of China. Here, the physical conformation keeps much the same: the language, however, becomes monosyllabic.

Now many able writers lay so much stress upon this monosyllabic character, as to believe that the separation between the tongues so constituted and those wherein we have an increase of syllables with a due amount of inflexion besides, is too broad to be got over. If speech were a mineral, this might, perhaps, be true. But speech grows, and if one philological fact be more capable of proof than another, it is that of a monosyllabic and uninflected tongue being a polysyllabic and inflected one in its first stage of development—or rather in its non-development.

The Kamskadale, the Koriak, the Aino-Japanese, and the Korean are the Asiatic languages most like those of America. Unhesitatingly as I make this assertion—an assertion for which I have numerous tabulated vocabularies as proof—I am by no means prepared to say that one-tenth part of the necessary work has been done for the parts in question; indeed, it is my impression that it is easier to connect America with the Kurile Isles and Japan, &c., than it is to make Japan and the Kurile Isles, &c., Asiatic. The group which they form belongs to an area where the displacements have been very great. The Kamskadale family is nearly extinct. The Koreans, who probably occupied a great part of Mantshuria, have been encroached on by both the Chinese and the Mantshús. The same has been the case with the Ainos of the lower Amúr. Lastly, the whole of the northern half of China was originally in the occupancy of tribes who were probably intermediate to their Chinese conquerors, the Mantshús and the Koreans.

That the philological affinities necessary for making out the Asiatic origin of the Americans lie anywhere but on the surface of the language, I confess. Of the way whereby they should be looked for, the following is an instance.

The Yukahiri is an Asiatic language of the Kolyma and Indijirka. Compare its numerals with those of the other tribes in the direction of America. They differ. They are not Koriak, not Kamskadale, by no means Eskimo; nor yet Kolúch. Before we find the name of a single Yukahiri unit reappearing in other languages, we must go as far south along the western coast of America as the parts about Vancouver’s Island. There we find the Hailtsa tongue—where malúk = two.

Now the Yukahiri term for two is not malúk. It is a word which I do not remember. Nevertheless, malúk = two does exist in the Yukahiri. The word for eight is malúk × the term for four (2 × 4).

This phænomenon would be repeated in English if our numerals ran thus:—1. one; 2. pair; 4. four; 8. two-fours; in which case all arguments based upon the correspondence or non-correspondence of the English numerals with those of Germany and Scandinavia would be as valid as if the word two were the actual name of the second unit. Indeed, in one respect they would be more so. The peculiar way in which the Hailtsa malúk reappears in the Yukahiri is conclusive against the name being borrowed. Whether it is accidental is quite another question. This depends upon the extent to which it is a single coincidence, or one out of many. All that is attempted, at present, is to illustrate the extent to which resemblances may be disguised, and the consequent care requisite for detecting them[27].