Daniel G. Brinton

“ They have died out or amalgamated with others. What I have to argue for is the study of the dead languages of extinct and barbarous tribes.
You will readily see that my arguments must be drawn from other considerations than those of immediate utility. I must seek them in the broader fields of ethnology and philosophy; I must appeal to your interest in man as a race, as a member of a common species, as possessing in all his families and tribes the same mind, the same soul. ”

“ Ethnology, that which studies the various nations which make up the species. To both of these the science of Linguistics is more and more perceived to be a powerful, an indispensable auxiliary. Through it we get nearer to the real man, his inner self, than by any other avenue of approach, and it needs no argument to show that nothing more closely binds men into a social unit than a common language. Without it, indeed, there can be no true national unity. The affinities of speech, properly analyzed and valued, are our most trustworthy guides in tracing the relationship and descent of nations. ”

“ Modern civilized nations hold that prejudice yet, in the sense that each insists that its own language is the best one extant, the highest in the scale, and that wherein others differ from it in structure they are inferior.
So unfortunately placed is this prejudice with reference to my subject, that in the very volume issued by our government at Washington to encourage the study of the Indian languages, there is a long essay to prove that English is the noblest, most perfect language in the world, while all the native languages are, in comparison, of a very low grade indeed! ”

“ In no other way can the history of the development of his arts be reached. You are doubtless aware that diligent students of the Aryan languages have succeeded in faithfully depicting the arts and habits of that ancient community in which the common ancestors of Greek and Roman, Persian and Dane, Brahmin and Irishman dwelt together as of one blood and one speech. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Yet many of the profoundest linguists of this century have maintained that a fully inflected language, like the Greek or Latin, is for that very reason ahead of all others. We may suspect that when a writer lauds his native tongue at the expense of others, he is influenced by a prejudice in its favor and an absence of facility in the others.
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 [15] language. ”

“ As the intention of all speech is the expression of thought, and as the final purpose of all thinking is the discovery of truth, so the ideal of language, the point toward which it strives, is the absolute form for the realization of intellectual function.
In this high quest no tongue can be overlooked, none can be left out of account. One is just as important as another. ”

“ It is useless for any one to write about the religion of an American tribe who has not prepared himself by a study of its language, and acquainted himself with the applications of linguistics to mythology. ”

“ As the biologist in pursuit of that marvellous something which we call “the vital principle” turns from the complex organisms of the higher animals and plants to life in its simplest expression in microbes and single cells, so in the future will the linguist find that he is nearest the solution of the most weighty problems of his science when he directs his attention to the least cultivated languages. ”

“ Wherever they were met, whether far up in Canada, along the shores of Lake Superior, on the banks of the Delaware, by the Virginia streams, or in the pine woods of Maine, they always had a tale to tell of the Great Hare, the wonderful Rabbit which in times long ago created the world, became the father of the race, taught his children the arts of life and the chase, and still lives somewhere far to the East where the sun rises. ”

“ It looks at the idiom of a nation, not as a dry catalogue of words and grammatical rules, but as the living expression of the thinking power of man, as the highest manifestation of that spiritual energy which has lifted him from the level of the brute, the complete definition of which, in its origin and evolution, is the loftiest aim of universal history. ”

“ After eighteen hundred years of labor, science has reached that point which the religious instinct divined, and it is in the name of science that I claim for these neglected monuments of man’s powers that attention which they deserve.
Anthropology is the science which studies man as a species ”

“ The study of the Basque, a language unknown out of a few secluded valleys in the Pyrenees.
There are many reasons why unwritten languages, like those of America, are more interesting, more promising in results, to the student of linguistics than those which for [13] generations have been cast in the conventional moulds of written speech.
Their structure is more direct, simple, transparent; they reveal more clearly the laws of the linguistic powers in their daily exercise; they are less tied down to hereditary formulæ and meaningless repetitions. ”

“ Such suggestions as these will give you some idea of the value of American languages to American ethnology. But I should be doing injustice to my subject were I to confine my arguments in favor of their study to this horizon. If they are essential to a comprehension of the red race, not less so are they to the science of linguistics in general. This science deals not with languages, but with language. ”

“ It was the proud prerogative of Christianity first to proclaim this great truth, to break down the distinctions of race and the prejudices of nationalities, in order to erect upon their ruins that catholic temple of universal brotherhood which excludes no man as a stranger or an alien. ”

“ The time has not long passed when the only good reasons for studying a language were held to be either that we might thereby acquaint ourselves with its literature; or that certain business, trading, or political interests might be subserved ”

“ It would be very unfair to compare the dictionary of an Indian language with the last edition of Webster’s Unabridged. But take the English dictionaries of the latter half of the sixteenth century, before Spenser and Shakespeare wrote, and compare them with the Mexican vocabulary of Molina, which contains about [20] 13,000 words, or with the Maya vocabulary of the convent of Motul, which presents over 20,000, both prepared at that date, and your procedure will be just, and you will find it not disadvantageous to the American side of the question. ”

“ We can turn them, like the reflector of a microscope, on the secret and hidden mysteries of the aboriginal man, and discover his inmost motives, his impulses, his concealed hopes and fears, those that gave rise to his customs and laws, his schemes of social life, his superstitions and his religions. ”

“ If this is true in general, it is particularly so in the ethnology of America. Language is almost our only clue to discover the kinship of those countless scattered hordes who roamed the forests of this broad continent. ”

“ European languages have been loaded with several thousand such by metaphysics and mysticism, and it has required several generations to discover that they are empty wind-bags, full of sound and signifying nothing. ”

“ 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 ”

“ I have made some collections for a study of a different character. Of all the traits of a nation, the most decisive on its social life and destiny is the estimate it places upon women,—that is, upon the relation of the sexes. ”

“ As the structure of a language reflects in a measure, and as, on the other hand, it in a measure controls and directs the mental workings of those who speak it, the student of psychology must occupy himself with the speech of the most illiterate races in order to understand their theory of things, their notions of what is about them. ”

“ The interest which attaches to our native soil and to the homes of our ancestors—an interest which it is the praiseworthy purpose of this Society to inculcate and cherish—this interest might be supposed to extend to the languages of those nations who for uncounted generations possessed the land which we have occupied relatively so short a time. ”

“ Such is the general character of American languages, and such are the reasons why they should be preserved and studied. The field is vast and demands many laborers to reap all the fruit that it promises. It is believed at present that there are about two hundred wholly independent stocks of languages among the aborigines of this continent. They vary most widely in vocabulary, and seemingly scarcely less so in grammar. ”

“ In Italy, the natal soil of Columbus, in Spain, so long the mistress of the Indies, and in England, the mother of the bold navigators who explored the coasts of the New World, I know not a single person who gives his chief interest to this pursuit. ”

“ Yet it is well known to students that the power of forming abstracts is possessed in a remarkable degree by many native languages. The most recondite formulæ of dogmatic religion, such as the definition of the Trinity and the difference between consubstantiation and transubstantiation, have been translated into many of them without introducing foreign words, and in entire conformity with their grammatical structure. ”

“ Personal names, family names, titles, forms of salutation, methods of address, terms of endearment, respect, and reproach, words expressing the emotions, these are what infallibly reveal the daily social family life of a community, and the way in which its members regard one another. ”

“ Through its aid alone we have reached a positive knowledge that most of the area of South America, including the whole of the West Indies, was occupied by three great families of nations, not one of which had formed any important settlement on the northern continent. ”

“ J. Hammond Trumbull, whose Algonkin studies are marked by the truest scientific spirit, and the works on special dialects of Dr. Washington Matthews, the Abbé Cuoq, and others.
[23] Whatever these worthy students have done, has been prompted solely by a love of the subject and an appreciation of its scientific value. They have worked without reward or the hope of reward, without external stimulus, and almost without recognition.
Not an institution of the higher education in this land has an instructor in this branch; not one of our learned societies has offered inducements for its study ”

“ 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. ”