[1862] A prominent feature is the process of uniting words lengthwise, so to speak, which gives a single utterance the import of a sentence. This characteristic of the American languages has been called polysynthetic, incorporative, holophrastic, aggregative, and agglutinative. H. H. Bancroft instances the word for letter-postage in Aztec as being “Amatlacuilolitquitcatlaxtlahuilli,” which really signifies by its component parts, “payment received for carrying a paper on which something is written.” Cf. Brinton’s On polysynthesism and incorporation as characteristic of American languages (Philad., 1885).
[1863] Hayden says: “The dialects of the western continent, radically united among themselves and radically distinguished from all others, stand in hoary brotherhood by the side of the most ancient vocal systems of the human race.”
[1864] Morgan, in his Systems of Consanguinity, contends for this linguistic unity, though (in 1866) he admits that “the dialects and stock languages have not been explored with sufficient thoroughness.”
[1865] Gallatin says of them: “They bear the impress of primitive languages, ... and attest the antiquity of the population,—an antiquity the earliest we are permitted to assume.” This was of course written before the geological evidences of the antiquity of man were understood, and the remoteness referred to was a period near the great dispersion of Babel.
[1866] The appendix of this work has a good general summary of the Ethnography and Philology of America, by A. H. Keane.
[1867] The interlinking method of communication between tribes of different languages is what is called sign or gesture language, and the study of it shows that in much the same forms it is spread over the continent. It has been specially studied by Col. Garrick Mallery. Cf. his papers in the Amer. Antiquarian, ii. 218; Proc. Amer. Asso. Adv. Science, Saratoga meeting, 1880; and at length in the First Annual Rept. Bur. of Ethnology (1881). He notes his sources of information on pp. 395, 401. He had earlier printed under the Bureau’s sanction his Introduction to the Study of Sign Language (Washington, 1880). The subject is again considered in the Third Rept. of the Bureau, p. xxvi. Cf. also W. P. Clark’s Indian Sign-language, with Explanatory Notes (Philad., 1885). Morgan (Systems of Consanguinity, 227) expresses the opinion that it has the germinal principle “from which came, first, the pictographs of the northern Indians and of the Aztecs; and, secondly, as its ultimate development, the ideographic and possibly the hieroglyphic language of the Palenqué and Copan monuments.”
In addition to languages and dialects, we have a whole body of jargons, a conventional mixture of tongues, adduced by continued intercourse of peoples speaking different languages. They grew up very early, where the French came in contact with the aborigines, and Father Le Jeune mentions one in 1633 (Hist. Mag., v. 345). The Chinook jargon, for instance, was, if not invented, at least developed by the Hudson Bay Company’s servants, out of French, English, and several Indian tongues (whose share predominates), to facilitate their trade with the natives, and does not contain, at an outside limit, more than 400 or 500 words. There is some reason to believe that the Indian portion of this jargon is older, however, than the English contact (Bancroft, iii. 632-3; Gibbs’s Chinook Dictionary; Horatio Hale in Wilkes’ U. S. Explor. Exped.).
[1868] See the section on “Americana,” with a foot-note on linguistic collections. Haven summed up what had been done in this field in 1855 in his Archæology of the U. S. p. 53.
[1869] There is a less extensive survey, but wider in territory, in Short’s North Americans of Antiquity, ch. 10.
[1870] Vol. III. p. 355.