[1891] A considerable body of literature in this language has come down to us. Bancroft (iii. 728) enumerates a number of the principal religious manuals, etc. Icazbalceta in the first volume of his Bibliografia Mexicana (Mexico, 1886), in cataloguing the books issued in Mexico before 1600, includes all that were printed in the native tongue. Brinton gives some account of such native authors in his Aboriginal American authors and their productions, especially those in the native languages. A chapter in the history of literature (Philad., 1883). Cf. his paper in the Congrès des Amér., Copenhagen, 1883, p. 54. Bancroft (iii. 730) gives some citations as to its literary value. Brinton has illustrated this quality in some of his lesser monographs, as in his Ancient Nahuatl Poetry (Philad., 1887); and in his Study of the Nahuatl language (1886), in which he gives specimens and enumerates the dictionaries and texts. He says there are more than a hundred authors in it (Amer. Antiquarian, viii. 22). Icazbalceta has collected many Nahua MSS., and his brother-in-law, Francisco Pimentel, has used them in his Cuadro descriptivo y comparativo de las Lenguas indigenas de México (1862), of which there is a German translation by Isidor Epstein (N. Y., 1877). This is based on a second augmented edition (Mexico, 1874-75), in which the tongues of northern Mexico are better represented, and a general classification of the languages is added. Pimentel (i. 154) asserts that it is a mistake to suppose that the Chichimecs spoke Nahua. Cf., however, Bancroft (iii. 724) and Short, 255, 480. Pimentel’s opinions are weighty, and follow in this respect those of Orozco y Berra, Sahagún, Ixtlilxochitl; but later, Veytia had maintained the reverse.
Lucien Adam includes the Nahua in his Etudes sur six langues Américaines (Paris, 1878). Aubin wrote “Sur la langue Méxicaine et la philologie Américaine” in the Archives de la Soc. Amér. de France, n. s., vol. i. Brasseur contributed various articles on Mexican philology to the Revue Orientale et Américaine. Dr. C. Hermann Berendt formed an Analytical Alphabet for the Mexican and Central America languages (N. Y., 1869). Buschmann has a study in the Mémoirs de l’Académie de Berlin, and separately, Ueber die Astekischen Ortsnamen (Berlin, 1853). Henri de Charencey in his Mélanges de Philologie (Paris, 1883) has a paper “Sur quelques familles de langues du Méxique.” V. A. Malte-Brun gave in the Compte Rendu, Cong. des Américanistes, 1877 (vol. ii. p. 10), a paper “La distribution ethnographique des nations et des langues au Méxique.” Reference has been made elsewhere to the important publication of Manuel Orozco y Berra, Geografia de las lenguas y carta etnográfica de México, precedidos de un ensayo de classificacion de las mismas lenguas y de apuntes para las inmigraciones de las tribus (Mexico, 1864). The work is said to be the fruit of twelve years’ constant study, and to have been based in some part on MSS. belonging to Icazbalceta, dating back to the latter part of the sixteenth century (enumerated in Peab. Mus. Repts., ii. 559). There is some adverse criticism. Peschel (Races of Men, 438) thinks the linguistic map of Mexico in Orozco y Berra’s work the only good feature in the book, since the author spreads old errors anew in consequence of his unacquaintance with Buschmann’s researches. A series of linguistic monographic essays on the Aztec names of places is embraced in Dr. Antonio Peñafiel’s Nombres Geografico de Mexico. Catalogo alfabetico de los nombres de lugar pertenecientes al idioma “Nahuatl” estudio jeroglifico de la matricula de los tributos del codice Mendocino (Mexico, 1885). In the Archives de la Soc. Amér. de France, n. s., 179, iii. there is an essay by Siméon, “La langue Méxicaine et son histoire.”
The affiliation of the Aztec with the Pueblo stocks is traced by Bancroft, iii. 665, who follows out the diversities of those stocks (pp. 671, 681). Cf. for various views Morgan’s Systems of Consanguinity, 260; Buschmann’s Die Völker und Sprachen Neu Mexico’s, and First Rept. Bur. of Ethnology, p. xxxi.
[1892] Some authorities give fourteen dialects of the Maya. Cf. the table in Bancroft, iii. 562, etc., and the statements in Garcia y Cubas, translated by Geo. F. Henderson as The Republic of Mexico. It is still spoken in the greatest purity about the Balize, as is commonly said; but Le Plongeon goes somewhat inland and says he found it “in all its pristine purity” in the neighborhood of Lake Peten. Le Plongeon, with that extravagance which has in the end deprived him of the sympathy and encouragement due to his noteworthy labors, says, “One third of this Maya tongue is pure Greek,” following Brasseur in one of his vagaries, who thought he found in 15,000 Maya vocables at least 7,000 that bore a striking resemblance to the language of Homer.
[1893] The bibliographies will add to this enumeration. The Pinart Catalogue (pp. 98-100) gives a partial list. Only some of the more important monographs upon features of the Maya language can be mentioned: Father Pedro Beltran de Santa Rosa’s Arte del idioma Maya (Mexico, 1746) was so rare that Brasseur did not secure it, but Leclerc catalogues it (no. 2,280), as well as the reprint (Merida, 1859) edited by José D. Espinosa. There is a study of the Maya tongues included in a paper printed first by Carl Hermann Berendt in the Journal of the Amer. Geog. Soc. (viii. 132, for 1876), which was later issued separately as Remarks on the centres of ancient civilization in Central America and their geographical distribution (N. Y., 1876). It is accompanied by a map. (Cf. also his “Explorations in Central America” in the Smithsonian Rept., 1867.) Brasseur included in his Manuscrit Troano (Paris, 1869-70), and later published separately, a Dictionnaire, Grammaire et Chrestomathie de la langue Maya (Paris, 1872); the dictionary containing 10,000 words, the grammar being a translation from Father Gabriel de Saint Bonaventure, while the chrestomathy was a gathering of specimens ancient and modern, of the language. Brasseur, in his mutable way, found in the first season of his studies the Greek, Latin, English, German, Scandinavian, not to name others, to have correspondences with the Maya, and ended in deriving them from that tongue as the primitive language. (Cf. Short, 476.) Dr. Brinton has a paper on The Ancient Phonetic Alphabet of Yucatan (N. Y., 1870), and he read at the Buffalo meeting (1886) of the Amer. Assoc. for the Advancement of Science a paper on the phonetic element of the graphic system of the Mayas, etc., which is printed in the American Antiquarian, viii. 347. In the introduction of his Maya Chronicles (Philad., 1882) he examines the language and literature of the Mayas. He refers to a “Disertacion sobre la historia de la lengua Maya o Yucateca” by Crescencio Carrello y Ancona in the Revista de Merida, 1870. Charencey has printed various special papers, like a Fragment de Chrestomathie de la langue Maya antique (Paris, 1875) from the Revue de Philologie et d’Ethnographie, and a paper read before the Copenhagen meeting of the Congrès des Américanistes (Compte Rendu, p. 379), “De la formation des mots en lengua Maya.” Landa’s Relation as published by Brasseur (Paris, 1864) is of course a leading source.
Of the Quiché branch of the Maya we know most from Brasseur’s Popul Vuh and from his Gramatica de la lengua Quiché (Paris, 1862), in the appendix of which he printed the Rabinal Achi, a drama in the Quiché tongue. Father Ildefonso José Flores, a native of the country, was professor of the Cakchiquel language in the university of Guatemala in the last century, and published a Arte de la lengua metropolitana del Reyno Cakchiquel (Guatemala, 1753), which was unknown to later scholars, till Brasseur discovered a copy in 1856 (Leclerc, no. 2,270). The literature of the Cakchiquel dialect is examined in the introduction to Brinton’s Grammar of the Cakchiquel language (Philad., 1884), edited for the American Philosophical Society. Cf. Brinton’s little treatise On the language and ethnologic position of the Xinca Indians of Guatemala (Philadelphia, 1884); his So-called Alaguilac language of Guatemala in the Proc. Am. Philosoph. Soc., 1887, p. 366; and Otto Stoll’s Zur Ethnographie der Republik Guatemala (Zurich, 1884).
We owe to Brinton, also, a few discussions of the Nicaragua tongues, both in their Maya and Aztec relations. He has discussed the local dialect of this region in the introduction of The Güegüence; a comedy ballet in the Nahuatl-Spanish dialect of Nicaragua (Philadelphia, 1883), and in his Notes on the Mangue, an extinct dialect formerly spoken in Nicaragua (Philadelphia, 1886).
[1894] Notwithstanding this commonness of origin, if such be the case, there is a striking truth in what Max Müller says: “The thoughts of primitive humanity were not only different from our thoughts, but different also from what we think their thoughts ought to have been.”
[1895] See Vol. IV. p. 295.
[1896] Such are Sagard’s Histoire du Canada (1636); Nicolas Perrot’s Mémoire sur les Mœurs, Coutumes et Religion des Sauvages, involving his experience from 1665 to 1699; Lafitau’s Mœurs des Sauvages (1724), and the like.