Daniel G. Brinton

“ Some former mythologists had supposed that even in the savage state man feels a sense of awe before the mighty forces of nature and the terrible mysteries of life; that joy in light and existence, dread of death and darkness, love of family and country, are emotions so intimate, so native to the soul, as nowhere to be absent—so potent as to find expressions in the highest imaginative forms of thought and speech. ”

“ We are merely beginning the enormous labor which is before us; we have yet to discover the methods by which we can analyze fruitfully the facts we already know. But I look forward with the utmost confidence to a rich return from such investigations. The day is coming, and that rapidly, when the pre-historic life of man in both the New and the Old World will be revealed to us in a thousand unexpected details. We have but to turn backward about thirty years to reach a time when the science of pre-historic archæology was unknown, and its early gropings were jeered at as absurdities. ”

“ I appear before you this evening to enter a plea for one of the most neglected branches of learning, for a study usually considered hopelessly dry and unproductive—that of American aboriginal languages.
It might be thought that such a topic, in America and among Americans, would attract a reasonably large number of students. The interest which attaches to our native soil and to the homes of our ancestors 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. ”

“ Indeed, an eminent linguist has been so impressed with this feature that he has proposed to classify them distinctively as “pronominal languages.” They have many classes of pronouns, sometimes as many as eighteen, which is more than twice as many as the Greek. There is often no distinction between a noun and a verb other than the pronoun which governs it. That is, if a word is employed with one form of the pronoun it becomes a noun, if with another pronoun, it becomes a verb.
We have something of the same kind in English. In the phrase, “I love,” love is a verb; but in “my love,” it is a noun. ”

“ There is every reason to suppose that the same is true of all the stone and brick edifices of Mexico and Central America. The majority of them were occupied at the period of the Conquest; others were in process of building; and of others the record of the date of their construction was clearly in memory and was not distant. Thus, the famous temple of Huitzilopochtli at Tenochtitlan, and the spacious palace—or, if you prefer the word, “communal house”—of the ruler of Tezcuco, had been completed within the lifetime of many who met the Spaniards. ”

“ 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.
It is true that in many of these tongues there is no distinction made between expressions, which with us are carefully separated, and are so in thought. Thus, in the Tupi of Brazil and elsewhere, there is but one word for the three expressions, “his father,” “he is a father,” and “he has a father;” ”

“ But a ready-witted man has always a means of escape. All he has to do is to pluck a green branch from a tree, and waving it before him, begin a lively dance. This invariably throws the Wood Man into convulsions of mirth. He laughs and laughs until he falls to the ground, and once down, having no joints, he cannot rise, and the hunter can proceed leisurely on his journey. It is singular, says Dr. Berendt, how widely distributed is the belief in this strange fancy. It recurs in precisely the same form in Yucatan, in Peten, in Tabasco, around Palenque, etc. ”

“ Man conquers nature as he does his enemy—by cutting her down. The world at present uses iron, or its next product steel, for that purpose; before it came into vogue many nations employed bronze; but in the earliest periods of man’s history, and to-day in some savage tribes, stone was the substance almost exclusively wrought for this purpose. These distinctions divide the progress of man into the three great periods; the Age of Iron, the Age of Bronze, and the Age of Stone.
Do not make the mistake of supposing that the remains of human art reveal this sequence in every locality ”

“ This third class of words, although in the history of language they are frequently of later growth than the two former, probably express the sentiment which underlies both these, and that is a dim, unconscious sense of the unity which is revealed to man most perfectly in the purest and highest love, which at its sublimest height does away with the antagonism of independent personality, and blends the I and the thou in a oneness of existence. ”

“ On the other hand, we have the recent utterance of so able an ethnologist as Major J. W. Powell to the effect that, “With regard to the mounds so widely scattered between the two oceans, it may be said that mound-building tribes were known in the early history of discovery of this continent, and that the vestiges of art discovered do not excel in any respect the arts of the Indian tribes known to history. There is, therefore, no reason for us to search for an extralimital origin through lost tribes for the arts discovered in the mounds of North America.” ”

“ 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.
Besides this, each of these stocks is subdivided into dialects, each distinguished by its own series of phonetic changes, and its own new words. What an opportunity is thus offered for the study of the natural evolution of language, unfettered by the petrifying art of writing! ”

“ With reference to the growth of American languages, it was Humboldt’s view that they manifest the utmost refractoriness both to external influences and to internal modifications. They reveal a marvellous tenacity of traditional words and forms, not only in dialects, but even in particular classes of the community, men having different expressions from women, the old from the young, the higher from the lower classes. These are maintained with scrupulous exactitude through generations, and three centuries of daily commingling with the white race have scarcely altered their grammar or phonetics. ”

“ It is high time for this talk about the Toltecs as a mighty people, precursors of the Azteca, and their instructors in the arts of civilization, to disappear from the pages of history. The residents of ancient Tula, the Tolteca, were nothing more than a sept of the Nahuas themselves, the ancestors of those Mexica who built Tenochtitlan in 1325. This is stated as plainly as can be in the Aztec records, and should now be conceded by all. The mythical Tula, and all its rulers and inhabitants, are the baseless dreams of poetic fancy, which we principally owe to the Tezcucan poets. ”

“ Yucatan presents a strange spectacle to the ethnologist. The native race, which in nearly every other part of the American continent has disappeared before the white invaders or else become their acknowledged inferior, has there gained the upper hand. The native language has ousted the Spanish to that extent that whole villages of whites speak Maya only, and the fortunes of war in the last generation have sided so much with the native braves that they have regained undisputed possession of by far the larger part of the peninsula. ”

“ Every man present knows this. He can name among his acquaintances men of unusual culture who are coarse voluptuaries, and others of the humblest education who have the delicacy of a refined woman. So it is with families, and so it is with tribes. I have illustrated this lately by an analysis of the words meaning “to love” in all its senses in five leading American linguistic stocks, and have shown by the irrefragable proof of language how much they differ in this respect, and how much also the same tribe may differ from itself at various periods of its growth. ”

“ 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. ”

“ When we turn to the monumental data, to the architecture and structural relics of the ancient Americans, we naturally think first of the imposing stone-built fortresses of Peru, the massive pyramids and temples of Yucatan and Mexico, and the vast brick-piles of the Pueblo Indians. ”

“ Berendt, who spent seventeen years in studying the languages of Central America, has pointedly called attention to the great predominance of words in them expressing painful, over those expressing pleasurable emotions. It teaches us how little the happiness of man depends upon his environment, that the merriest of the American nations is found precisely where according to our usual notions almost every cheering and enlivening element is withdrawn from life, where darkness, cold, and destitution have undisputed rule. ”

“ I have taken up the most unfavorable aspect of the Algonkin hero-god, and shown how parallel it is to the tendencies of the human mind everywhere; in the Journey of the Soul, the striking analogies of Egyptian, Aryan and Aztec myth have been brought together and an explanation offered, which I believe will not be gainsaid by any competent student of Egyptian symbolism. The Sacred Symbols found in all continents are explained by a similar train of reasoning; while the modern folk-lore of two tribes of semi-Christianized Indians of to-day reveals some relics of the ancient usages. ”

“ In spite of the total dissimilarity of climate and other physical surroundings, the tribes of the tropics differ no more from those near the Arctic circle than they do among themselves. This is a striking lesson how independent of environment are the essential characteristics of a race, and it is a sweeping refutation of those theories which make such characteristics dependent upon external agencies.
A still more remarkable fact has been demonstrated by Professor J. Kollmann of Bâle: to wit, that the essential physical identity of the American race is as extended in time as it is in space. ”

“ Carl Abel has pointed out many in the ancient Coptic, and I doubt not they were characteristic of all primitive speech.
To explain their presence we must reflect on the nature of the human mind, and the ascertained laws of thought. One of these fundamental and necessary laws of thought, that usually called the second, was expressed by the older logicians in the phrase Omnis determinatio est negatio, and by their modern followers in the formula, “A is not not-A;” in other words, a quality, an idea, an element of knowledge, can rise into cognition only by being limited by that which it is not. ”

“ Wherever we turn, whether in the most ancient chants of the Vedas, in the graceful forms of the Greek religious fancy, in the gaunt and weird imaginings of the Norse poets, or in the complex but brilliant pictures of mediæval romance, we find the same distinct plan of this journey of the soul. ”

“ But in this essay I am contemplating man as he was before hundreds of generations of speaking ancestors had evolved such cerebral powers.
I begin with some observations on the phonetic elements. These are no other than what we call the alphabet, the simple sounds which combined together make up the words of a language. In all European tongues, the mere letters of the alphabet, by themselves, have no meaning and convey no idea; furthermore, their value in a word is fixed; and, thirdly, arranged in a word, they are sufficient to convey its sound and sense to one acquainted with their values. ”