THERE were many tribes and many tribe-groups, or, as the latter are usually designated, “stocks,” among the Amerinds. These various stocks differed considerably from each other in manners, customs, possibly in origin, and in languages, the last often being widely different.[14] Yet there was a homogeneity binding them all together as one distinct race while at the same time separating them completely from other races of the world as now constituted. The subdivisions of the Amerind stocks were not always contiguously distributed on the continent, but, as in the case of the Navajo-Apache branch of the Athapascan, sometimes separated from their kindred by wide stretches of territory peopled by other stocks, and also, as in the case of the Navajos, somewhat altered by absorption of people of another stock. Various methods of arranging the distribution and classification of these stocks have been attempted, but the basis of language appears to offer the most advantages and the greatest accuracy. There are some who dispute the correctness of the present analysis of the Amerind languages, and deprecate the classifications obtained by this means,[15] but foremost students, like Brinton, Gatschet, Powell, Steinthal, and others, have pronounced unequivocally in favour of its value when applied with judgment.

“Nothing is so indelible as speech,” wrote George Bancroft; “sounds that in ages of unknown antiquity were spoken among the nations of Hindostan still live in their significancy in the language which we daily utter.” And this fact has been the corner-stone of the modern science of linguistics, which maintains accordingly that the possession of similar language roots and grammatical construction by two otherwise distinct tribes proves a relationship or a common descent. In this way, as is well understood, the Indo-Germanic—that is, our European stock—has been traced back toward its origin. The accuracy of this has been questioned, but it doubtless affords the best method attainable.[16] The same principle is applicable to the American languages, which afford an immense field for linguistic study in their great diversity. This diversity is not popularly understood, the majority of our people believing that if a person can speak “Indian” he could converse with every tribe on the continent. Yet within a limited area in Arizona he would find useless in four different tribes the language he had learned, say, in California; and in California itself some twenty or thirty tribes would listen to his words, as well as to those of each other, without a gleam of understanding. And not one of the languages of any of these tribes would serve him in the Mississippi or in the Atlantic region any better than English, for the Iroquois and the Algonquin and other Eastern tongues are as widely different from those of California as they are from each other, while every one contains numerous dialects, or what may be called sub-languages, also exhibiting great variations. The early missionaries were slow to discover these facts, and it was a source of discouragement for them to learn that, after long study to acquire a language, it was spoken by only a single group of the natives, while adjacent to them dwelt others who spoke a totally different one.[17]

Even where a group of Amerinds speak related languages, or dialects, there are, and were, such wide variations that the one is not understood by those speaking the other. Therefore we have in North America not only a large number of distinct languages, but within these separate languages an immense number of dialects or sub-languages, sometimes as many as twenty in one stock varying from each other as much as, say, English and German. At least sixty-five of the separate stock languages are distinguished in North America which appear so radically separated from each other that it is believed impossible that they ever should have sprung from the same parent, unless it may have been at a time so remote as to be beyond the scope of present investigation. In the classification according to these languages it has been necessary to have a general designation for each stock, and in selecting the names to be thus used, Powell and others have observed the law of priority of mention, as far as possible, and have derived the stock name from the author first mentioning it in print since 1836, the date of Gallatin’s great work, which is taken as the foundation. The termination “an,” or “ian,” is added to distinguish the family or stock name from a tribal name, for often a tribe bears the name given to the whole stock. As examples, Algonquian may be mentioned as a stock name taken from the tribal name of Algonquin, and Mayan from the tribal name, Maya. This is not always strictly adhered to outside of the Bureau of Ethnology because of its frequent inconvenience, and in the case of Mayan the term Maya is preferably used by some investigators and writers as being simpler, and Brinton gives it as the stock name.[18] Following the distribution of tribes as closely as possible at the time of the first contact with white men, Powell and his able associates of the U. S. Bureau of Ethnology in Washington have produced a map, based on Gallatin’s.[19] The separate stocks north of Mexico are each represented by a different colour, every colour standing for a variation in language as great as that between Hebrew and English, not related as English and Spanish. Fifty-eight are thus shown, but south of the Mexican border are perhaps a dozen more. Continuous study may succeed in bringing some of the stocks into relationship or in dividing them still further. In their beginning, languages probably changed rapidly; memory was deficient, intercourse slight, and comparatively short separations of tribes speaking originally the same tongue were sufficient to establish entire new sets of words. These separations were apt to occur frequently when methods of subsistence were crude and difficult, migrations frequent, and population sparse. As races developed memory grew to better proportions, and after the introduction among the Amerinds of mnemonic records and other memory devices their languages became more crystallised, till within the later centuries changes have come about slowly. That many more languages once existed on the American continents than we have any trace of is, therefore, probable. By intercourse, by intermingling, by the crossing and absorbing of stocks was finally produced what we find to-day, or did find yesterday, a reduced number of different stocks, but still so many that the archæologist views the field with amazement, and the layman looks upon it with incredulity.

And these Amerind languages are as remarkable for their separation in a body from the Old World languages as they are in their separation from each other. This in itself seems to bestow upon the Amerind people a vast antiquity in their isolation from other peoples, and adding to it the testimony of their art works, their implements, and their pictographs and hieroglyphs, there seems to be no escape from granting them to be a division of mankind by themselves.

Not only does the differentiation of the stock languages indicate antiquity, but that of the dialects adds strong testimony. Brinton cites Dr. Stohl’s opinion that “the difference which is presented between the Cakchiquel and the Maya dialects could not have arisen in less than 2000 years.”[20]

It may be urged that the Amerind languages are loose and shifting and that a few centuries would be sufficient to bring about on this continent a complete and total difference in a language from its mother tongue in, we will say, Siberia; but the more closely the matter is studied the more apparent is the tenacity with which each stock retains its special form. Of this tenacity a modern example exists in the village of Tewa (or Hano) now forming one of the seven villages of the Moki, and situated on what is known as the “First or East Mesa.” The people of this village are not Hopi (Moki) stock, Hopi being the Moki name for themselves,[21] but belong to a Rio Grande stock, the Tañoan of Powell, and the Tehua of Brinton, having come from the Rio Grande country to their present location somewhere about 1680. The Moki, who are believed to belong to the Shoshonean stock (though they are probably composite), permitted them to repair and occupy old houses which stood on the site of the present village and there they have lived amicably ever since, to all appearances completely amalgamated with the Moki. The ordinary observer sees little to distinguish them from the other Amerinds of the locality, and they speak the Moki language like Mokis, but within their own village and by their own firesides they largely use the speech of their forefathers, and to all appearances will go on speaking it till the end. Here, then, is this little community separated for a long period and by many miles from their immediate kindred, mingling daily with people of another stock and another language, yet preserving their own language intact.[22] And if this has happened once within historical times it may have happened before any number of times, and goes to prove that these various languages have in them elements of stability greater than has heretofore been admitted. Powell says that in his long study of savage tongues he has everywhere been “impressed with the fact that they are singularly persistent, and that a language which is dependent for its existence upon oral tradition is not easily modified.” On the other hand John Fiske expresses the opinion that “barbaric languages are neither widespread nor durable. In the course of two or three generations a dialect gets so strangely altered as virtually to lose its identity.” The Algonquian languages were spread over an immense area, and the Shoshonean had an even greater range.

Brinton contradicts the assertion of Waldeck “that the language (of the Mayas) has undergone such extensive changes that what was written a century ago is unintelligible to a native of to-day. So far is this from the truth that, except for a few obsolete words, the narrative of the Conquest, written more than three hundred years ago by the chief, Pech, could be read without difficulty by any educated native.” Thus it seems probable that the Amerind languages extant have been spoken nearly as we know them to-day for a great many centuries, and that modifications crept in slowly; so slowly that the language roots and grammatical construction of the various stocks are so distinct that they form the safest guide now available in the classification of the various branches of the Amerind race; and furthermore that, judged by these tests, these languages have no relationship to any other group. Powell places more reliance, as a test, in the lexical elements,—that is, in the language roots,—than in the grammatical structure, as the latter is constantly changing. “The roots of a language,” he maintains, “are its most permanent characteristics, and while the words which are formed from them may change so as to obscure their elements or in some cases even to lose them, it seems that they are never lost from all, but can be recovered in large part.” If there should be advanced the criticism that these Amerind languages had little or no literature, and therefore are not equal to languages so recorded, as a test of affinity, it may be noted that the largest number of languages throughout the world have produced no literature. Max Müller says: “It is a mere accident that languages should ever have been reduced to writing.” However this may be, such an accident appears to be in the line of regular human development, and when a people arrive at the right point in their mental evolution they invent a means of recording their thought. It seems, therefore, to be rather a state of mind than an accident. The Mayas of this continent had reached the point for speech recording and, following the natural order, they invented a system and made books of record.

Because of certain similarities of physique, of words, or of myths, or of customs, however slight, the Amerinds have been identified with almost every people under the sun.[23] These similarities are only such as might occur where similar organisms are continuously subjected to similar conditions, and the really remarkable fact is that there are not more and even closer resemblances. Some of the arguments advanced to uphold the so-called identifications are extraordinary. In language the Amerinds have been found to speak—or at least have been claimed to speak—Irish, Welsh, Norse, Chinese, and many other independent or interrelated tongues, yet with the exception of the Basque, the structure of all the Old World languages has little in common with the Amerind. Brinton has shown[24] that a number of Maya words resemble our English words of the same meanings, as, bateel and battle, hol and hole, hun and one, lum and loam, pol and poll (head), potum and pot, pul and pull, and so on, but nobody has yet ventured to deduce from this that the Mayas are first cousins of the English.[25] The Maya language certainly does differ from almost all others on the continent in its construction. Before Gallatin’s time, the wildest statements flourished because the few linguists who had paid attention to Amerind languages had worked in rather a desultory manner and had made no determined effort to systematise them and group them under their stock names. Gallatin was the first to bring order out of what appeared to be an almost hopeless tangle, and Powell, Brinton, and others, supplementing and developing these labours of Gallatin, have been able to present the subject in definite shape with a promise of greater accuracy in the near future. Many languages which are known to have existed at the beginning of European acquaintance with America have disappeared with the tribes which used them. Some of these were spoken by mere handfuls of people, while others were wider spread.

With so many distinct languages on the continent, and with many tribes totally ignorant of the speech of their neighbours, there became necessary a means for the interchange of ideas which should not entirely rely on spoken words, and this means was found in a “sign-language” assisted by a few words of each spoken language which were simple and commonly known, or by words which belonged to no spoken language but which through accident were attributed by each side to the other. This sign-language was of extensive development and existed not only among the Amerinds but all over the world, and bore a resemblance to the sign-language now used in some of our deaf-mute schools. This peculiar sign-language possessed varieties like spoken language corresponding to dialects. For a time its existence was disputed, but the work of Mallery and others has established it beyond question.

Besides the gesture language, tribes not understanding each other’s speech had recourse to a medley of corrupted words from each language, from other languages, and from no language at all but springing into being through misunderstandings and necessities. When white men came upon the scene they often thought they were talking “Indian,” while the Amerinds thought it was the white man’s tongue, and neither was talking the language of the other at all or of any other people in existence. It was a jargon. If the whites had previously learned something of another Amerind tongue, for example Algonquin, and they were trying to talk to Dakotas, they would use Algonquin terms, supposing them to be intelligible to the Dakotas, and the latter would suppose them to be English words. These would gradually accumulate through usage, together with nondescript terms, until a working jargon was formed. In this may perhaps be discovered one of the causes that led to the former belief that Amerind languages were loose and changeable.

One of the most important and most interesting of the jargon languages is that known as the Chinook,[26] in the north-western United States, along the Columbia River, which grew into such proportions that it formed at length the principal language in a wide district. It is made up of words from Chinook, Chehali, Selish, Nootka, English, French, and other languages, with a large number of words that belong nowhere else. This same process in earlier times going on between several different tribes doubtless gave birth to permanent languages, which in their turn were again modified. Even in our own every-day English we use hundreds of borrowed words and also some that, like “skedaddle,” “mugwump,” etc., were coined for special occasions. We hardly give a thought to the origin of these words which are seen side by side with others that have come to us through a thousand years and still others that were only yesterday the gift of the Amerind. How few realise when they say chocolate, squash, mush, hominy, pone, succotash, or other terms equally familiar from Amerind sources, that they are talking “Indian”! Tobacco, of course, all understand came from the native language, but it is generally supposed to have been the name of the plant, when in reality it was the name of the roll of leaves from the plant, which was called “a tobacco,” as we now call it a cigar.

Sometimes words appear similar when they have no shadow of relationship, the resemblance being purely accidental. Powell cites the word “tia,” meaning deer in some of the Shoshonean languages. This was at first supposed to be an attempt on the part of the Shoshones to pronounce our own word “deer,” but further investigation has shown it to be the original Shoshone name for deer, and that in some dialects it was called “tiats” and in others “tiav.” Brinton, as already mentioned, calls attention to similar resemblances between Maya and English words.

A tribe would often possess two languages, one known only to the priesthood and the other the language of the people, the priest language being the older, just as to-day we find the priests of the Roman Catholic Church using a dead language in their sacred functions while the parishioners use the ordinary one. Bourke believed that the Zuñis and the Mokis each have a language of this kind,[27] and it is thought that the Central-American tribes also had. Such hieratic languages would necessarily be far older than the languages in common use, therefore if the latter tend to indicate a great antiquity for the Amerind race, we should be carried still farther back by the hieratic languages. Occasionally tribes have spoken two languages, both familiar to the common people, as in the case of the Tewas speaking Moki as well as their own language, already referred to. The Tubares of Mexico, nearly extinct, are said to have spoken two different languages among themselves, one a dialect of the Nahuatl.[28]

Gatschet, the eminent student of Amerind languages, declares that “the majority suppose that an Indian language is simply a gibberish not worth bothering about, but languages that can preserve identity for centuries are certainly something more than gibberish.” He further points out that while “the Indian neglects to express with accuracy some relations which seem of permanent importance to us, as tense and sex, his language is largely superior to ours in the variety of its personal pronouns, in many forms expressing the mode of action, or the idea of property and possession, and the relations of the persons addressed to the subject of the sentence.”

Again it is said by some persons, “Why study languages which have no literature, and dialects that are known only to savages?” but Max Müller insists that “dialects which never produced any literature at all, the jargons of savage tribes, the clicks of Hottentots, and the vocal modulations of the Indo-Chinese, are as important, nay, for the solution of some of our problems, more important, than the poetry of Homer or the prose of Cicero. We do not want to know languages; we want to know language, what language is, how it can form a vehicle or organ of thought; we want to know its origin, its nature, its laws.”

Here in North America exists a splendid field for this study, but until recently it has been sadly neglected. This neglect has been largely due to the attitude of the people at large, an attitude of apathy and contempt for anything “Indian.” Opportunities that can never come again have been allowed to pass heedlessly away. We have not half realised the importance of collecting the linguistic treasures that are scattered across the length and breadth of the country, partly because of the foolish and narrow estimate of the Amerind which for so long a time dominated the public mind. We have despised his languages because we thought he did not bathe with sufficient frequency! “To draw conclusions from the exterior appearance of a people on their language,” exclaims Gatschet, “and to suppose that a man not worth looking at cannot speak a language worth studying, would be the acme of superficiality.” Remnants of tribes have died out and their language unrecorded has died with them even within a comparatively few years.[29]

As an example of the necessity for prompt investigation, an incident mentioned by Putnam may be cited. In a conversation with a gentleman whom he had recently met, he learned of Mrs. Oliver’s acquaintance with the Karankawas of Texas, and her knowledge of their language. Now it happened that Gatschet had made a fruitless search in Texas for some trustworthy information regarding the language of this extinct tribe, and when Putnam sent him Mrs. Oliver’s vocabulary he was delighted and immediately paid a visit to the old lady, obtaining much additional information about these Amerinds, among whom Mrs. Oliver had spent her early life. Within three months afterward she died.

That the Amerind has no literature is true if by literature we mean only written books, for outside of Yucatan and Mexico there were no native books, and the Spaniards burned all they could find of these, but if we accept the enormous number of legends, myths, songs, and ceremonial lore mnemonically recorded, as literature, and they surely become literature when we write them down, then the Amerind is not so poor in this respect as has been generally considered.

In North America, as in other parts of the world, the various language stocks occupy areas differing enormously in proportions. Some are confined to small tracts, while others, as mentioned above, are spread over wide territory. The Algonquian stock, for instance, occupied an immense area while the Zuñian is a mere spot in the expanse of New Mexico. More than thirty of the stocks lie within the Pacific region, six on the banks of the Klamath River alone.

The Amerind languages, with the exception of the Maya and possibly one or two others, are polysynthetic, and no other languages of the world have exactly this construction, though, as has previously been stated, that of the Basques has a construction somewhat similar. By polysynthetic is meant a language that permits the incorporation of a great many words in one sentence, till all are fused into one “bunch-word” of from ten to fifteen or more syllables. Examples are often quoted from Eskimo[30] which in our eyes appear ridiculous in their cumbersome length, but they are as intelligible and valuable to the Eskimo as our words are to us. While the Basque more nearly resembles the Amerind languages than does any other Old World tongue, it stops short of the incorporating power of that of the Amerinds. In Basque this is restricted to the verb and some pronominal elements, but in the Amerind it embraces all parts of speech. It is specially interesting to note also that Basque in the Old World is an isolated language, the only one there of its kind. The Amerinds who look alike are not always the ones who speak the same language. Quite different-looking Amerinds will sometimes speak the same tongue, while others who look the same will speak different ones. The Pueblos of New Mexico and Arizona, while apparently of one race, speak several different stock languages, while some of the natives of Labrador, who are of apparently different stocks, speak dialects of one language. Nor, as has been mentioned, is the area occupied by one stock always continuous.[31] The Athapascan, next to the Eskimo, is the most northerly stock, yet three small branches are found south, on the Pacific coast of the United States, while two large branches, the Navajos and the Apaches, extend through Arizona and New Mexico, the latter far into the country of Mexico proper. In the same way the Siouan[32] lies in the middle region of the United States, but a small band still lingered, at the beginning of the Columbian era, on the Gulf coast in Mexico, and another smaller band in eastern North Carolina, having for a near neighbour still another, which spread itself over three States. These detached bands indicate great movements on the part of the various stocks. One Amerind language, the Eskimo, has been traced across Bering Strait into Asia, but thus far no language has been traced from Asia into America. When the Asiatic and North-west Coast investigations instituted by the American Museum of Natural History, under the auspices of Mr. Jesup, are completed, something more definite will be known on the subject of possible affinities. In addition to the great difference in their formation, some of the Amerind languages do not possess sounds common to European languages, and on the other hand they sometimes have sounds rarely heard elsewhere. The Pai Utes have no “f,” and when they try to pronounce “fire” they can only say “piah.” The Moki cannot say “s” before “k” or hard “c.” In trying to pronounce “school” they say “cool.” There is no “r” in Huron, Mexican, Otomi, and some other languages, and several have no “i.” The Iroquois have no labials, and do not articulate with their lips. Cherokee has the same peculiarity, as it is an Iroquoian language. The Karankawa contains sounds rarely heard in European languages, while other sounds common to the latter are absent altogether from the Karankawa, so that in this language is found not only a complete difference from European tongues in grammatic structure and lexical elements, but a complete difference in phonetics as well, and in the last respect it differs also from other Amerind languages. Altogether the Karankawa shows many peculiarities, and it is unfortunate that the authentic material relating to it is so limited. In the Navajo there is a common combination of “tl” with a peculiar explosive click.[33] The tongue is placed with the tip against the roof of the mouth and pressure as for “t” made against it, the “l” sound immediately following by an explosion at the side. It is a peculiar sound, and the Navajo language is filled with it.[34]

In recording these Amerind languages and their peculiar sounds, no definite system was employed till recently. Travellers wrote the Amerind words down with ordinary letters as they understood them, thus producing great diversity in method and results. Differences are due sometimes to a lack of perception on the part of the recorder, and also sometimes to a difference in pronunciation on the part of the Amerinds themselves, and again to differences of methods of recording. To catch the exact sounds of a new language requires a musical ear. I do not mean a knowledge of music, but an ear that follows a tune easily. Without such an ear a person is not fit to record language sounds that are novel no matter how good a linguist he may be. Investigators ought to have their ears tested for sound-perception as the eyes of locomotive engineers are tested for colour.

Recognising the importance of a system in the recording of the Amerind languages—the importance of systematising the orthography of these languages—the U. S. Bureau of Ethnology published an Introduction to the Study of Indian Languages, in which an alphabet was advocated that was adapted to recording harmoniously the Amerind languages. In this over sixty separate sounds are given by signs following as closely as possible our own alphabet. This is complicated and many investigators use their own systems and translate afterwards into the more general one. The great difference in the Amerind sounds necessitates many different characters and inverted letters standing for peculiar sounds.

Of all the Amerind languages of North America, that of the Eskimo is probably the most homogeneous. Its dialects are alike from one side of the continent to the other, following similarity in other respects. Dall states there is a saying “that a man understanding thoroughly the dialect of either extreme, could pass from village to village, from Greenland to Labrador, from Labrador to Bering Strait, and thence southward to the Copper River, staying five days in each halting place, and that in all that journey he would encounter no greater differences of speech and customs than he could master in the few days devoted to each settlement. Probably there is no other race in the world distributed over an equal territory, which exhibits such solidarity.” They do not take to new languages. Though the Eskimo of Alaska have had long intercourse with English-speaking men, their English is very limited. Like most of the Amerinds, they prefer to invent their own terms for articles that are new to them. The Aleutian Islanders are of Eskimo stock, but their language is different from the main body of the family, and would not be understood by them.

The writings of the Cherokees in the syllabary of Sequoyah are of sacred formulas. These were written out by the shamans and are thoroughly Amerind. “They are not disjointed fragments,” says Mooney, who made a careful study of the subject, “of a system long since extinct, but are the revelation of a living faith which still has its priests and devoted adherents.” The language used is full of archaic forms and figurative expressions, some of which even the shamans cannot now understand. Some of these are highly poetical, especially the prayers “used to win the love of a woman or to destroy the life of an enemy, in which we find such expressions as: ‘Now your soul fades away—your spirit shall grow less and dwindle away never to reappear.’ ‘Let her be completely veiled in loneliness,—O Black Spider, may you hold her soul in your web, so that it may never get through the meshes!’ ‘Your soul has come into the very centre of my soul, never to turn away.’”[35]

In nearly all the Amerind languages there was a poetical touch. But what seems to be poetry to us arose partly from the inability of the Amerind to express himself in a spiritual way. As his religion was chiefly zoötheistic, and the heavenly bodies and natural forces were personified as animals, his comparisons and references were not intended for metaphor, but were merely the ordinary workings of his mind on the material at his command.

NOTE

As it is sometimes useful to have at hand an orderly geographical and cultural classification of tribes, this one used by Livingston Farrand is here given: I, Eskimo; II, North Pacific; III, Mackenzie Basin and High Plateaus; IV, Columbia River and California; V, Plains; VI, Eastern Woodlands; VII, The South-west and Mexico.