Respecting, however, the word Astek (Asteca) itself, the present writer commits himself to the doctrine that it was no native name at all, and that it was a word belonging to the Maya, and foreign to the Mexican, class of languages. It was as foreign to the latter as Welsh is to the language of the British Principality; as German or Allemagne to the High and Low Dutch forms of speech; as barbarus to the languages in contact with the Latin and Greek, but not themselves either one or the other.
On the other hand, it was a Maya word, in the way that Welsh and German are English, and in the way that Allemand is a French one.
It was a word belonging to the country into which the Mexicans intruded, and to the populations upon which they encroached. These called their invaders Asteca, just as the Scotch Gael calls an Englishman, a Saxon.
a. The form is Maya, the termination-eca being common whereever any form of the Maya speech is to be found.
b. It is too like the word Huasteca to be accidental. Now, Huasteca is the name of a language spoken in the parts about Tampico; a language separated in respect to its geographical position from the other branches of the Maya family, (for which Guatemala and Yucatan are the chief localities) but not separated (as is indicated in the Mithridates) from these same Maya tongues philologically. Hence Huasteca is a Maya word; and what Huasteca is, Asteca is likely to be.
The isolation of the Huasteca branch of the Maya family indicates invasion, encroachment, conquest, displacement; the invaders, &c. being the Mexicans, called by themselves by some name hitherto undetermined, but by the older occupants of the country, Astek.
It is believed, too, though this is more or less of an obiter dictum, that nine-tenths of the so-called Mexican civilization, as indicated by its architecture, &c., was Maya, i. e. was referable to the old occupants rather than to the new invaders; standing in the same relation to that of the Mexicans, strictly speaking, as that of Italy did to that of the Goths and Lombards.
Whence came these invaders? The evidence of the phonetic part of the language points to the parts about Quadra and Vancouver's Island, and to the populations of the Upper Oregon—populations like the Chinuk, the Salish, the Atna, &c. Here, for the first time, we meet with languages where the peculiar phonesis of the Mexican language, the preponderance of the sound expressed by tl, reappears. For all the intermediate parts, with one or two exceptions, the character of the phonesis is Maya, i. e. soft, vocalic, and marked by the absence of those harsh elements that characterize the Mexican, the Chinuk, and the Atna equally. The extent to which the glossarial evidence agrees with the phonetic has yet to be investigated, the doctrine here indicated being a suggestion rather than aught else.
So is the doctrine that both the Nicaraguan and Mexican invasions were maritime. Strange as this may sound in the case of an ordinary American population, it should not do so in the case of a population deduced from the Chinuk and Salish areas and from the archipelago to the north of Quadra's and Vancouver's Island. However, it is not the fact itself that is of so much value. The principle involved in its investigation is weightier. This is, that the distribution of an allied population, along a coast, and at intervals, is primâ facie evidence of the ocean having been the path along which they moved.