Dr. Carl Hermann Berendt has published his papers in Spanish, English, and German, and some of them will be found in the Smithsonian Reports, in the Berlin Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, and in the Revista de Mérida. Under the auspices of the American Ethnological Society, a fac-simile reproduction of his graphic Analytical Alphabet for the Mexican and Central American languages was published in 1869, the result of twelve years’ study in those countries.[1889]
The languages of what are called the civilized nations of the central regions of America deserve more particular attention.
In the Mexican empire the Aztec was largely predominant, but not exclusively spoken, for about twenty other tongues were more or less in vogue in different parts. Humboldt and others have found occasional traces in words of an earlier language than the Aztec or Nahua, but different from the Maya, which in Brasseur’s opinion was the language of the country in those pre-Nahua days. Bancroft, contrary to some recent philologists, holds the speech of the Toltec, Chichimec, and Aztec times to be one and the same.[1890] It was perhaps the most copious and most perfected of all the aboriginal tongues; and in proof of this are cited the opinions of the early Spanish scholars, the successes of the missionaries in the use of it in imparting the subtleties of their faith, and the literary use which was made of it by the native scholars, as soon as they had adapted the Roman alphabet to its vocabulary and forms.[1891]
The Maya has much the same prominence farther south that the Nahua has in the northerly parts of the territory of the Spanish conquest, and a dialect of it, the Tzendal, still spoken near Palenqué, is considered to be the oldest form of it, though probably this dialect was a departure from the original stock. It is one of the evidences that the early Mayas may have come by way of the West India islands that modern philologists say the native tongues of those islands were allied to the Maya. Bancroft (iii. 759, with other references, 760) refers to the list of spoken tongues given in Palacio’s Carta al Rey de España (1576) as the best enumeration of the early Spanish writers.[1892] For its literary value we must consult some of the authorities like Orozco y Berra, mentioned in connection with the Aztec. Squier published a Monograph of authors who have written on the languages of Central America, and collected vocabularies and composed works in the native dialects of that country (Albany, 1861,—100 copies), in which he mentions 110 such authors, and gives a list of their printed and MS. works. Those who have used these native tongues for written productions are named in Ludewig’s Literature of the Amer. Aborig. Languages (London, 1858) and in Brinton’s Aboriginal American Authors (Phila., 1883).[1893]
The philology of the South American peoples has not been so well compassed as that of the northern continent. The classified bibliographies show the range of it under such heads as Ande (or Campa), Araucanians (Chilena), Arrawak, Aymara, Brazil (the principal work being F. P. von Martius’s Beiträge zur Ethnographie und Sprachenkunde Amerika’s, zumal Brasiliens, Leipzig, 1867, with a second part called Glossaria linguarum brasiliensium, Erlangen, 1863), Chama, Chibcha (or Muysca, Mosca), Cumanagota, Galibi, Goajira, Guarani, Kiriri (Kariri), Lule, Moxa, Paez, Quichua, Tehuelhet, Tonocote, Tupi, etc.