in America, I hope it will be in my power to discover interesting facts, which will lead to a better knowledge than we yet possess of the genius and character of the languages of America. Among the materials which the committee has collected, are a considerable number of vocabularies of various languages of the north and south of this part of our continent. Of those it may be supposed that little use can be made towards the principal object of this inquiry. But I conceive it to be otherwise. When the student has become tolerably conversant with Indian languages, and is familiarized as it were, with their physiognomy, he acquires a greater degree of perception, which enables him to judge with more or less certainty, sometimes by a single insulated word, of their general construction and grammatical forms. Their verbal affinities aid him considerably in this respect; for it is natural to suppose, and has hitherto always been found to be the case, that languages which their etymology shews to be derived from the same stock, partake of the forms and construction of the mother tongue and of each other. If this hypothesis is correct, the language of the Washash Indians, commonly called Osages, of which the committee possess a vocabulary by Dr. Murray of Louisville, from its affinity with the Naudowessie and Huron, may be considered as a dialect derived from the Iroquois stock, and presumed to be, like it, polysynthetic in its forms. By means of this vocabulary we have acquired a knowledge of the wide-spread extent of the family of Indian nations of Iroquois origin, which not long ago were thought to exist only in the vicinity of the great lakes, while we are enabled to trace them even to the banks of the Missouri. Thus one branch of knowledge comes in aid of another, and a course of studies pursued with a sole view to languages, by pointing out the various families and connexions of Indian nations, may, perhaps, lead to the discovery of their origin. THIRD QUESTION. AMERICAN LANGUAGES CONSIDERED IN RELATION TO THOSE OF THE OLD WORLD. When we cast our eyes for the first time on the original structure of the languages of the American Indians, and consider the numerous novel forms with which they abound, it is impossible to resist the impression which forces itself upon us, that we are among the aboriginal inhabitants of a New World. We find a new manner of compounding words from various roots, so as to strike the mind at once with a whole mass of ideas; a new manner of expressing the cases of substantives, by inflecting the verbs which govern them; a new number, (the particular plural,) applied to the declension of nouns and conjugation of verbs; a new concordance in tense of the conjunction with the verb; we see not only pronouns, as in the Hebrew and some other languages, but adjectives, conjunctions, adverbs, combined with the principal part of speech, and producing an immense variety of verbal forms. When we consider these, and many other singularities which so eminently characterize the American idioms, we naturally ask ourselves the question: Are languages, formed on this model, to be found in any other part of the earth? I cannot but consider this question as very interesting, as it may lead to important discoveries in the history of man. That there are languages in which some of the forms which characterize those of the Indians are to be found, is a fact too well known to be controverted. We know that the Hebrew, particularly, has the pronominal affixes, the transitive and reflected verbs, and that the gender is even expressed in it sometimes by a modification of that part of speech; we know also that the transitive forms of verbs are found in other languages than the Hebrew and its kindred idioms; but the question is not reduced to this; we are to inquire whether, amidst the numerous languages of the old world, there are any that can be said to bear a sufficient analogy in point of construction and forms to those of our Indians, to entitle them to be placed in the same class with them. This question is not entirely new. Professor Vater, whose extensive knowledge of languages peculiarly fitted him for its investigation, has taken the pains to compare almost every language with those of the American Indians, with a view to ascertain whether they were equalled in the numerous combinations of their verbs. I shall not attempt to go over the same ground which he has so ably and so laboriously examined; but taking up the subject where he left it, and extending the inquiry to the whole grammatical system, I hope I shall not be thought presumptuous if I take the liberty of adding a few observations of my own. This eminent philologist tells us, that among all the languages which he took the pains to compare with those of the American Indians, in order to ascertain whether any of them possessed combinations of the verbs similar to theirs, he could find but three which, in this respect could be assimilated to them; which were, in Europe, the Basque, in Asia, the Tschuktschit and in Africa, the idiom of Congo.+ Let me be permitted to say a few words on each of those languages. 1. The BASQUE. I once was inclined to believe with Professor Vater, partly on his authority, and partly from the feeble light which I thought I drew from the comparison of a book translated into this language with its original, that the forms of its verbs were similar to those of the American Indians. I had not yet seen at that time the Mithridates, in which the peculiar construction of that idiom is fully explained by the Professor himself Untersuchungen über Amerikas Bevölkerung, p. 210. at the beginning of the second volume, and by a learned dissertation of Baron William Von Humboldt in the fourth. Then I began to be acquainted for the first time with a language which I believe has not its fellow in all the rest of the world. It is preserved in a corner of Europe, by a few thousand mountaineers, the sole remaining fragment of, perhaps, a hundred dialects, constructed on the same plan, which probably existed and were universally spoken at a remote period in that quarter of the globe. Like the bones of the Mammoth, and the shells of unknown fishes, the races of which have perished, it remains a frightful monument of the immense destruction produced by a succession of ages. There it stands single and alone of its kind, surrounded by idioms whose modern construction bears no kind of analogy to it. It is a strange and a singular language; like those of the Indians, highly artificial in its forms, and so compounded as to express many ideas at the same time; but when those forms are compared with those of the American languages, it is impossible not to perceive the immense difference which exists between them. It will be sufficient for my purpose to exemplify it in one single point. It is one of the most striking traits in the Indian languages, that they are entirely deficient of our auxiliary verbs to have, and to be. There are no words that I know in any American idioms to express abstractedly the ideas signified by those two verbs. They have the verb sto, I am, (in a particular situation or place,) but not the verb sum,* the verbs possideo, teneo, but Molina, in his Grammar of the Othomi language gives the conjugation of a verb which, he says, corresponds to the Latin sum, es, fui; but I am inclined to believe that he is mistaken, and that this verb answers to stare, sto, as in the other American langnages. For he says, afterwards, that it is never used in conjunction with an adjective, and that to express, for inctance, I am rich. the adjective takes the form of a verb, and is itself conjugated, as in Latin, sapio, "I am wise," frigeo, "I am cold." Nor is it ever used as an auxiliary in the conjugation of other verbs. Therefore I do not see how it can be applied in its mere substantive sense. In the Mexican language, Zenteno acknowledges that it is abso lutely wanting, and that it is impossible to translate into that idiom the not habeo, in the vague sense that we affix to it. On the contrary, in the conjugation of the Basque verbs, these two auxiliaries are every thing, it is on them that is lavished all that profusion of forms which enables them to express together the relative ideas connected with the verb; while the principal action or passion is expressed separately and by itself by means of a participle. For instance, I love him is a transitive verb and is rendered in the Basque by maitetuba dot, which literally means amatum illum habeo ego. Maitetuba is the word which expresses the participal form amatum; the three other ideas are comprised in the monosyllable dot, the first letter of which, d, stands for illum; o is the root of the auxiliary verb habeo, and t represents the personal pronoun ego. It may be said, indeed, that these forms are complicated like those of the Indian verbs, and that like them they serve to express complex ideas; at the same time the difference in their arrangement is so great that it cannot be said that those languages are connected with or derived from each other. There are several other essential differences in the structure of the Basque idiom from those of the American Indians, which I avoid particularly noticing, for fear of drawing this report to too great a length, 2. The TSCHUKTSCHI. The people who bear this name are in fact two separate and distinct nations or tribes, one of which is called the Settled or Sedentary, and the other the Wandering or Rein-deer Tschuktchi. The former reside in the north easternmost peninsula of Asia, divided by a narrow strait from the American continent; the others inhabit the country to the south of them and north of the river Anadir. The sedentary Tschuktschi speak a dialect of the Karalit or Eskimaux, and from this circumstance as well "I am that I am," of the sacred writings. (Arte Mexic. p. 30.) I have in vain endeavoured to obtain a translation of that sentence into Delaware from Mr. Hecke welder, and I believe it cannot be literally render ed into any American language. * Mithridates, Vol. IV. p. 323. |