Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/199

The diversity of languages among our aborigines, already referred to, and the relations between the roots of their words, their vocabularies, and grammatical constructions have been the subjects of a vast amount of inquiry and discussion. The least learned and the most learned have contributed about equally to such information as we have on these subjects. Illiterate white men residing with the Indians as traders or agents, or sharing with them the camp, the hunt, or the war-path, have been forced to become linguists; and in some cases they have quickened their intelligence and sharpened their faculties to learn what they might about languages or dialects which, in their inflections and constructions, differ radically from all those in use among civilized men. With the single exception of that of an ingenious scholar among the Cherokees, no attempt, so far as we know, has ever been made by the natives on the whole stretch of this continent, from north to south, to construct a written language, — not even in the simplest phonetic characters. All has been left to sound and intonation. The tablets and scrolls inscribed or painted with symbols and hieroglyphics by the Aztecs to preserve the chronicles of the people, as described to us by the Spanish invaders, and as appears from the specimens of them still extant, were in no sense linguistic or phonetic transcripts or representations. The preponderance of evidence seems to favor the inference that ages ago more or less of intercourse was maintained between the aborigines, all the way through the continent from the Missouri to Mexico and Peru. This, however, seems to have ceased before the time of European discoveries. Certain it is — whether from devastating internal wars, from the difficulties of extended intercourse, from natural barriers, or the interposition of large spaces of vacant wilderness — there was then almost a total lack of intercommunication between widely separated