Page:Archæologia Americana—volume 2, 1836.djvu/200

164 A SYNOPSIS OF THE INDIAN TRIBES. [iNTROD. Eskimau, with the languages of South America, and with the scanty specimens within his reach of those of our own Indians, submitted to the further investigation of the learned the three following propositions, to wit : 1. That the American languages in general are rich in words and in grammatical forms, and that, in their complicated construction, the greatest order, method, and regularity prevail. 2. That these complicated forms, which he calls polysyn- thetic, appear to exist in all those languages from Greenland to Cape Horn. 3. That these forms appear to differ essentially from those of the ancient and modern languages of the old hemisphere. The last proposition does not fall within the scope of this essay, and is far beyond my very limited knowledge of lan- guages. All the information, connected with the first propos- ition, which could be obtained, has been collected, and will be found in a condensed form in the annexed grammatical notices and specimens of conjugations. But the inquiry has, with a single exception, been confined to the languages of our own Indians ; and the result, so far as it goes, fully confirms the first two propositions of Mr. Du Ponceau ; although I think, that there is less of method and regularity in the Delaware and other dialects of the Algonkin-Lenape, than in some of the other Indian languages. Yet the materials are very incomplete ; although we may perceive the general features, we cannot yet deduce with suf- ficient precision the rules of grammar or of the composition of words ; and there is some difficulty in discriminating between the specific characters which distinguish certain languages, and the general features which belong to all. But we are at least justified in asserting, that such a general character does exist, that it applies to all those American languages which have been suf- ficiently investigated, and that it seems to prove, beyond a doubt, that common origin, which could not be discovered in vocabula- ries so entirely different from each other. It is not however intended to assert, that all the American languages, without exception, possess that general character. It would indeed appear more astonishing, to find them all belonging to one and the same family, than to discover some, like the Chinese in Asia, and the Basque in Europe, of a structure altogether differing from the general mass. The fundamental characteristic of the Indian languages of