Casas Grandes occur in all the parts lately enumerated.
A great complication in the philological ethnography, is introduced by the Otomi dialects.
In a dissertation of Don Emmanuel Naxera's,[157] the author gives reasons for considering the Otomi to be a remarkable exception to the general character of the American languages. It is so far from being polysynthetic that it is monosyllabic. A fact like this was not likely to be underrated. The vicinity of the Otomi area to the Aztek, the semi-Asiatic character of the Mexican civilization, the analogies between it and the Japanese, were all circumstances likely to bring the populations of the Chinese type into the field of comparison. Hence the Otomi, after being in the first place disconnected with the American family of languages, ran the chance of being specially, and to the exclusion of the other tongues of the New World, connected with the Asiatic; and, herein, with those of the Seriform tribes and nations.
With his accustomed caution, Gallatin satisfies himself with saying what others have thought upon the matter, more especially the author of the dissertation in question; evidently, in his own mind, admitting no more than an analogy, not an affinity, with the Chinese.
The present writer doubts much whether even the facts of the case are yet ascertained, much less the true appreciation of their import.
1. He thinks that it has yet to be determined whether the comparative absence (if real) of inflections has arisen from the loss of forms previously existing, or from the nondevelopment of them in toto. In the latter case only the language would be in the predicament of the Seriform tongues, or aptotic; whereas in the former its parallel would be the English, an anaptotic language.
2. He thinks that the whole aspect of the question might be materially altered by changing the manner of putting it; i.e. by asking not whether the Otomi differs from the other American languages in being monosyllabic rather than polysynthetic, but by inquiring whether the other American tongues may not agree with the Otomi in being more monosyllabic than is generally supposed.
This latter point is one of great importance;—the fact of two such extreme forms of language as the monosyllabic and polysynthetic meeting has been shown by Schoolcraft in his remarks upon the structure of the Algonkin languages; the à priori likelihood of such a phænomenon being very great. The details of the transition itself, however, we see but imperfectly. That they are to be found, however, in the comparative philology of the Seriform tongues is undoubted. Here, even the difference, so important in the American tongues, between the animate and inanimate plural is foreshadowed; whilst the other so-called peculiarity of the polysynthetic tongues—the incorporation of the pronoun expressing the object with the verb, is only a fuller development of the principle which gives us, in the common languages of Europe, the reflective and middle forms. In the Icelandic kallast (=kalla sig=calls himself, originally kalla-sc), the incorporation of the name of the object is as truly a part of the grammar as it is in any American tongue whatsoever.
Again, more than one philologist has suggested that many American agglutinations are (like such forms as je l'aime, if written jelaime), instances of what may be called a mere printer's polysyntheticism, i.e. points of spelling rather than of real language.
Such are fragments of the criticism which breaks down two classes of differences at once; those between the Otomi and the other languages of America, and those between the American and non-American tongues in general.