It is the wide margin for error, already indicated, that vitiates much that has already been done in philological comparisons, and the over-eager recognition at all times of what is thought to be the word-shunting of “Grimm’s Law” has doubtless been responsible for other confusions.[1856]
Most of the general philological treatises touch more or less intimately the question of language as a test of race,[1857] and all of them engage in tracing affinities, each with confidence in a method that others with equal assurance may belittle.[1858] Thus Bancroft,[1859] reflecting an opinion long prevalent, says that “positive grammatical rules carry with them much more weight than mere word likenesses,”[1860] while, on the contrary, Dawson[1861] says that “grammar is, after all, only the clothing of language. The science consists in its root-words; and multitudes of root-words are identical in the American languages over vast areas.” This last proposition is, as we have seen, the principle on which this inquiry is now conducted with governmental patronage. “Each American language,” says George Bancroft, in his chapter on the dialects of North America, “was competent of itself, without improvement of scholars, to exemplify every rule of the logician and give utterance to every passion.” In accordance with such perhaps extreme views, it has been usually said that the American languages are in development in advance of aboriginal progress in other respects. It is another common observation that while a certain resemblance runs through all the native tongues,[1862] there is no such general resemblance to the old-world languages;[1863] but at the same time the linguistic proof of the unity of the American race is not irrefragable,[1864] and it would take tens of thousands of years, as Brinton holds, if there had been a single source, for the eighty stocks of the North American and for the hundred South American speeches to have developed themselves in all their varieties.[1865] Proceeding beyond stocks to dialects, and counting varieties, Ludewig, in his Literature of the American Languages, gave 1,100 different American languages; but an alphabetical list given by H. W. Bates in his Central America, West Indies and South America (London, 1882, 2d ed.)[1866] affords 1,700 names of such. The number, of course, depends on how exclusive we are in grouping dialects. Squier, for instance, gives only 400 tongues for both North and South America; for, as Nadaillac says, “philology has no precise definition of what constitutes a language.”[1867]
The most comprehensive survey of the bibliography of American linguistics, excluding South America, is in Pilling’s Proof-sheets of a bibliography of the languages of the North American Indians (Washington, 1885), a tentative issue of the Bureau of Ethnology, already mentioned. Pilling also earlier catalogued the linguistic MSS. in the library of the Bureau of Ethnology, in Powell’s First Report of that Bureau (p. 553), in which that bibliographer also gave a sketch of the history of gathering such collections. A section of the Bibliotheca Americana of Charles Leclerc (Paris, 1878) is given to linguistics, and it affords by groups one of the best keys to the literature of the aboriginal languages which we yet have, and it has been supplemented by additional lists issued since by Maisonneuve of Paris. Ludewig’s Literature of American Aboriginal Languages, with additions by W. Turner (London, 1858), was up to date, thirty years ago, a good list of grammars and dictionaries, but the increase has been considerable in this field since then (Pilling’s Eskimo Languages, p. 62). The libraries of collectors of Spanish-American history, as enumerated elsewhere,[1868] have usually included much on the linguistic history, and the most important of the printed lists for Mexico and Central America is that of Brasseur de Bourbourg’s Bibliothèque Mexico-Guatémalienne, précédée d’un coup d’œil sur les études américaines dans leurs rapports avec les études classiques, et suivi du tableau, par ordre alphabétique, des ouvrages de linguistique américaine contenus dans le même volume (Paris, 1871). This list is repeated with additions in the Catalogue de Alphonse L. Pinart et ... de Brasseur de Bourbourg (Paris, 1883). Field’s Indian Bibliography characterizes some of the leading books up to 1873; but the best source up to about the same date for a large part of North America is found in the notes in that section of Bancroft’s Native Races, vol. iii., given to linguistics.[1869] The several Comptes Rendus of the Congrès des Américanistes have sections on the same subject, and the second volume of the Contributions to North American Ethnology, published by the U. S. Geological Survey (Powell’s), has been kept back for the completion of the linguistic studies of the government officials, which will ultimately, under the care of A. S. Gatschet, compose that belated volume. Major Powell, in his conduct of ethnological investigations for the United States government, has found efficient helpers in James C. Pilling, J. Owen Dorsey, S. R. Riggs, A. S. Gatschet, not to name others. Powell outlined some of his own views in an address on the evolution of language before the Anthropological Society of Washington, of which there is an abstract in their Transactions (1881), while the paper can be found in perfected shape as “The evolution of language from a study of the Indian languages,” in the First Report of the Bureau of Ethnology.
Among the earliest of the students of the native languages in the north were the Catholic missionaries in Canada and in the northwest, and there is much of interest in their observations as recorded in the Jesuit Relations. We find a Dictionnaire de la langue huronne in the Grand Voyage du Pays des Hurons (Paris, 1632, etc.).
The most conspicuous of the English publications of the seventeenth century was the Natick rendering of the Bible for the Massachusetts Indians, undertaken by the Apostle John Eliot, as he was called, at the expense of the London Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. Eliot also published a Grammar of the Massachusetts Indian Language (Cambridge, 1666), which, with notes by Peter S. Duponceau and an introduction by John Pickering, was printed for the Mass. Hist. Society in 1822, as was John Cotton’s Vocabulary of the Massachusetts Indian Language (Cambridge, 1830). Roger Williams’ Key into the language of America has been elsewhere referred to.[1870] The Rev. Jonathan Edwards wrote a paper on the language of the Mohegan Indians, which, with annotations by Pickering, was printed in the Mass. Hist. Soc. Coll. in 1823, and is called by Haven (Archæol. U. S., 29) the earliest exposition of the radical connection of the American languages. Dr. James Hammond Trumbull, the most learned of the students of these eastern languages, has furnished various papers on them in the publications of the American Philological Association and of the American Antiquarian Society,[1871] and has summarized the literature of the subject, with references, in the Memorial Hist. of Boston (vol. i.).
In the eighteenth century there were several philological recorders among the missionaries. Sebastian Rasle made a Dictionary of the Abnake Language, now preserved in MS. in Harvard College library, which, edited by John Pickering, was published as a volume of the Memoirs of the Amer. Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1833. A grammatical sketch of the Abnake as outlined in Rasle’s Dictionary is given by M. C. O’Brien in the Maine Hist. Soc. Coll., vol. ix. The publications of the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia have preserved for us the vocabularies and grammars of the Delaware language, collected and arranged by John Heckewelder[1872] and David Zeisberger, while the latter Moravian missionary collected a considerable MS. store of linguistic traces of the Indian tongues, a part of which is now preserved in Harvard College library.[1873] One of this last collection, an Indian Dictionary; English, German, Iroquois (the Onondaga), and Algonquin (the Delaware) (Cambridge, 1887,) has been carefully edited for the press by Eben Norton Horsford. Dr. John G. Shea published a Dictionnaire Français-Onontagué, édité d’après un manuscrit du 17e siècle (N. Y., 1859), which is preserved in the Mazarin library in Paris.
There was no attempt made to treat the study of the American languages in what would now be termed a scientific spirit by any English scholar till towards the end of the eighteenth century. The whole question of the origin of the Indians had for a long time been the subject of discussion, and it had of necessity taken more or less of a philological turn from the beginning; but the inquiry had been simply a theoretical one, with efforts to substantiate preconceived beliefs rather than to formulate inductive ones, as in such works as—not to name others—Adair’s American Indians (London, 1775), where every trace was referable to the Jews, and Count de Gebelin’s Monde Primitif (Paris, 1781), where a comparison of American and European vocabularies is given.[1874]
A much closer student appeared in Benjamin Smith Barton, of Philadelphia, though he was not wholly emancipated from these same prevalent notions of connecting the Indian tongues with the old-world speeches. He says that he was instigated to the study by Pallas’ Linguarum totius orbis Vocabularia comparativa (Petropolis, 1786, 1789), and the result was his New View of the Origin of the tribes and nations of America (Philad., 1797; again, 1798). He sets forth in his introduction his methods of study. Charlevoix had suggested that the linguistic test was the only one in studying the ethnological connections of these peoples; but Barton asserted that there were other manifestations, equally important, like the physical aspects, the modes of worship, and the myths. He examined forty different Indian languages, and thinks they show a common origin, and that remotely a connection existed between the old and new continents.