American Languages, and Why We Should Study Them

Those best acquainted with American tongues praise them most highly for flexibility, accuracy, and resources of expression. They place some of them above any Aryan language. But what is this to those who do not know them? To him who cannot bend the bow of Ulysses it naturally seems a useless and awkward weapon.

I do not ask you to accept this opinion either; but I do ask that you rid your minds of bias, and that you do not condemn a tongue because it differs widely from that which you speak.

American tongues do, indeed, differ very widely from those familiar to Aryan ears. Not that they are all alike in structure. That was a hasty generalization, dating from a time when they were less known. Yet the great majority of them have certain characteristics in common, sufficient to place them in a linguistic class by themselves. I shall name and explain some of these.

As of the first importance I would mention the prominence they assign to pronouns and pronominal forms. Indeed, an eminent linguist has been so impressed with this feature that he has proposed to classify them distinctively as “pronominal languages.” They have many classes of pronouns, sometimes as many as eighteen, which is more than twice as many as the Greek. There is often no distinction between a noun and a verb other than the pronoun which governs it. That is, if a word is employed with one form of the pronoun it becomes a noun, if with another pronoun, it becomes a verb.

We have something of the same kind in English. In the phrase “I love,” love is a verb; but in “my love,” it is a noun. It is noteworthy that this treatment of words as either nouns or verbs, as we please to employ them, was carried further by Shakespeare than by any other English writer. He seemed to divine in such a trait of language vast resources for varied and pointed expression. If I may venture a suggestion as to how it does confer peculiar strength to expressions, it is that it brings into especial prominence the idea of Personality; it directs all subjects of discourse by the notion of an individual, a living, personal unit. This imparts vividness to narratives, and directness and life to propositions.

Of these pronouns, that of the first person is usually the most developed. From it, in many dialects, are derived the demonstratives and relatives, which in Aryan languages were taken from the third person. This prominence of the Ego, this confidence in self, is a trait of the race as well as of their speech. It forms part of that savage independence of character which prevented them coalescing into great nations, and led them to prefer death to servitude.

Another characteristic, which at one time was supposed to be universal on this continent, is what Mr. Peter S. Du Ponceau named polysynthesis. He meant by this a power of running several words into one, dropping parts of them and retaining only the significant syllables. Long descriptive names of all objects of civilized life new to the Indians were thus coined with the greatest ease. Some of these are curious enough. The Pavant Indians call a school-house by one word, which means “a stopping-place where sorcery is practised;” their notion of book-learning being that it belongs to the uncanny arts. The Delaware word for horse means “the four-footed animal which carries on his back.”

This method of coining words is, however, by no means universal in American languages. It prevails in most of those in British America and the United States, in Aztec and various South American idioms; but in others, as the dialects found in Yucatan and Guatemala, and in the Tupi of Brazil, the Otomi of Mexico, and the Klamath of the Pacific coast, it is scarcely or not at all present.

Another trait, however, which was confounded with this by Mr. Du Ponceau, but really belongs in a different category of grammatical structure, is truly distinctive of the languages of the continent, and I am not sure that any one of them has been shown to be wholly devoid of it. This is what is called incorporation. It includes in the verb, or in the verbal expression, the object and manner of the action.

This is effected by making the subject of the verb an inseparable prefix, and by inserting between it and the verb itself, or sometimes directly in the latter, between its syllables, the object, direct or remote, and the particles indicating mode. The time or tense particles, on the other hand, will be placed at one end of this compound, either as prefixes or suffixes, thus placing the whole expression strictly within the limits of a verbal form of speech.

Both the above characteristics, I mean Polysynthesis and Incorporation, are unconscious efforts to carry out a certain theory of speech which has aptly enough been termed holophrasis, or the putting the whole of a phrase into a single word. This is the aim of each of them, though each endeavors to accomplish it by different means. Incorporation confines itself exclusively to verbal forms, while polysynthesis embraces both nouns and verbs.

Suppose we carry the analysis further, and see if we can obtain an answer to the query. Why did this effort at blending forms of speech obtain so widely? Such an inquiry will indicate how valuable to linguistic research would prove the study of this group of languages.

I think there is no doubt but that it points unmistakably to that very ancient, to that primordial period of human utterance when men had not yet learned to connect words into sentences, when their utmost efforts at articulate speech did not go beyond single words, which, aided by gestures and signs, served to convey their limited intellectual converse. Such single vocables did not belong to any particular part of speech. There was no grammar to that antique tongue. Its disconnected exclamations mean whole sentences in themselves.

A large part of the human race, notably, but not exclusively, the aborigines of this continent, continued the tradition of this mode of expression in the structure of their tongues long after the union of thought and sound in audible speech had been brought to a high degree of perfection.

Although I thus regard one of the most prominent peculiarities of American languages as a survival from an exceedingly low stage of human development, it by no means follows that this is an evidence of their inferiority.

The Chinese, who made no effort to combine the primitive vocables into one, but range them nakedly side by side, succeeded no better than the American Indians; and there is not much beyond assertion to prove that the Aryans, who, through their inflections, marked the relation of each word in the sentence by numerous tags of case, gender, number, etc., got any nearer the ideal perfection of language.

If we apply what is certainly a very fair test, to wit: the uses to which a language is and can be put, I cannot see that a well-developed American tongue, such as the Aztec or the Algonkin, in any way falls short of, say French or English.

It is true that in many of these tongues there is no distinction made between expressions, which with us are carefully separated, and are so in thought. Thus, in the Tupi of Brazil and elsewhere, there is but one word for the three expressions, “his father,” “he is a father,” and “he has a father;” in many, the simple form of the verb may convey three different ideas, as in Ute, where the word for “he seizes” means also “the seizer,” and as a descriptive noun, “a bear,” the animal which seizes.

This has been charged against these languages as a lack of “differentiation.” Grammatically this is so, but the same charge applies with almost equal force to the English language, where the same word may belong to any of four, five, even six parts of speech, dependent entirely on the connection in which it is used.