guage, from the traces of institutions, from religious beliefs, from legendary records, and artistic remains. The evidence from language is treated scientifically, and not as a kind of ingenious guessing. Señor Lopez first combats the idea that the living dialect of Peru is barbarous and fluctuating. It is not one of the casual and shifting forms of speech produced by nomad races. To which of the stages of language does this belong—the agglutinative, in which one root is fastened on to another, and a word is formed in which the constitutive elements are obviously distinct, or the inflexional, where the auxiliary roots get worn down and are only distinguishable by the philologist? As all known Aryan tongues are inflexional, Señor Lopez may appear to contradict himself when he says that Quichua is an agglutinative Aryan language. But he quotes Mr. Max Müller's opinion that there must have been a time when the germs of Aryan tongues had not yet reached the inflexional stage, and shows that while the form of Quichua is agglutinative, as in Turanian, the roots of words are Aryan. If this be so, Quichua may be a linguistic missing link.
When we first look at Quichua, with its multitude of words beginning with hu, and its great preponderance of q's, it seems almost as odd as Mexican. But many of these forms are due to a scanty alphabet, and really express familiar sounds; and many, again, result from the casual spelling of the Spaniards. We must now examine some of the forms which Aryan roots are supposed to take in Quichua. In the first place, Quichua abhors the shock of two consonants. Thus, a word like πλέω in Greek would be unpleasant to the Peruvian's ear, and he says pillui, 'I sail.' The plu, again, in pluma, a feather, is said to be found in pillu, 'to fly.' Quichua has no v, any more than Greek has, and just as the Greeks had to spell Roman words beginning with V with Ou, like Valerius—Οὐαλέριος—so, where Sanscrit has v, Quichua has sometimes hu. Here is a list of words in hu:
quichua. |
sanscrit. |
There is a Sanscrit root, kr, to act, to do: this root is found in more than three hundred names of peoples and places in
