Mayan languages

“ On any theory of human origin, the blended gradations of America’s widely diversified indigenous races, demand a lengthened period for their development; and equally, on any theory of the origin of languages, must time be prolonged to admit of the multiplication of mutually unintelligible dialects and tongues in the New World. It is estimated that there are nearly six hundred languages, and dialects matured into independent tongues, in Europe. ”

“ It was as fortunate as it was necessary that the single language of the learned should give way before the vulgar tongues, the speech of the people, each in its own region best fitted to phrase the feelings and the aspirations of races dissimilar in their characteristics and in their ideals. No one tongue could voice the opposite desires of the northern peoples and of the southern; and we see the several modern languages revealing by their structure as well as by their vocabularies the essential qualities of the races that fashioned them, each for its own use. ”

“ During the afternoon, whilst resting in the shade, I listened to the loud, discordant, and grating sounds pronounced by the Indians around me. The language spoken was Maya, which has been ascertained to be the parent stock of most of the languages and dialects spoken in Guatemala, Yucatan and the bordering territories. I asked my host to give me a specimen of their dialect. ”

“ And this wider divergence between the order of languages spoken in Northern Europe and the order of languages spoken in Southern Europe, answers to the longer time that has elapsed since their differentiation commenced. Further, these two orders of modern European languages, as well as Latin and Greek and certain extinct and spoken languages of the East, are shown to have traits in common which unite them into one great class known as Aryan languages; radically distinguished from the classes of languages spoken by the other main divisions of the human race. ”

“ When children are learning about England and its place in Europe and the World, they might as well be taught that English is an Aryan language, and that all Aryan languages have grown from the same roots, whereas Semitic languages are of another growth. ”

“ When we close our minds to months and years and think in centuries, it is easy to understand the diversity of languages. Tribes going off by themselves, drop words from their vocabulary as time goes on, and use other words that mean the same; after the passing of generations there is an entirely new dialect. It is so in nearly all the countries of the Old World; people living under the same government, neighbors, cannot talk to each other. ”

“ A linguistic invasion such as that of English by Old French is almost unparalleled. We have instances of the expulsion of one tongue by another, e.g., of the Celtic dialects of Gaul by Latin and of those of Britain by Anglo-Saxon. But a real blending of two languages can only occur when a large section of the population is bilingual for centuries. ”

“ But this does not necessarily hold of every language that an official of the British Empire may happen to need. It does not apply to the Indian tongues, nor to Chinese, nor, I should suppose, to the Fiji dialects. The only human faculty that is tested and brought into play in these acquisitions is the commonest kind of memory exercised for a certain time. The value to the Service of the man that can excel in spoken languages does not lie in his superior administrative ability, but in his being sooner fitted for actual duty. ”

“ The Chinese language can no longer be adduced in support of the hypothesis that our Aryan languages, or all human languages, started at first as a grammarless speech consisting of monosyllabic root-words. ”

“ Most, if not all of them, are related to, if indeed they did not spring from one mother tongue, the Maya, of which a dialect, called the Tzendal is said to be the oldest language spoken in any of these countries. In fact, they all appear to be dialects and variations of some few tongues of yet greater antiquity, which again have sprung from the oldest of all, the Maya. ”

“ According to the able linguist, Dr. Stoll, the difference which is presented between the Cakchiquel and Maya dialects could not have arisen in less than two thousand years; [22] and any one who has carefully compared the earliest grammars of an American tongue with its present condition will acknowledge that the changes are surprisingly few. To me the exceeding diversity of languages in America and the many dialects into which these have split, are cogent proofs of the vast antiquity of the race, an antiquity stretching back tens of thousands of years. ”

“ Only one of the races named—the Malayan—is monoglottic. All the others seem to speak tongues with no genetic relationship, at least none indicated by etymology. The profounder study of language, however, leads to a different conclusion—to one which, as cautiously expressed by a recent writer, teaches that “every large, connected, terrestrial area developed only one, or scarcely more than one, fundamental linguistic type, and this with such marked individuality that rarely did any of its languages depart from the general scheme.” ”

“ Among those the Nahuatl or Aztec has been appealed to; and the Mayas have been noted as a lettered people whose hieroglyphic records, and later transcripts of written documents, are now the object of intelligent investigation both by European and American philologists. The Maya language strikingly contrasts, in its soft, vocalic forms, with the languages of nations immediately to the north of its native area. It is that which, according to Stephens, was affirmed to be still spoken by a living race in a region beyond the Great Sierra, extending to Yucatan and the Mexican Gulf. ”

“ For all that known dialects prove to the contrary, on the other hand, there may have been one primitive language, from which the descendant languages have varied so widely, that neither their words nor their formation now indicate their unity in long past ages, while, on the other hand, the primitive tongues of mankind may have been numerous, and the extreme uulikeness of such languages as Basque, Chinese, Peruvian, Hottentot, and Sanskrit, may arise from absolute independence of origin.
The language spoken by any tribe or nation is not of itself absolute evidence as to its race-affinities. ”

“ The acquisition of any one of that great family of languages, all derived, more or less remotely, from the Latin, which extends over the whole south and west of Europe, cannot fail to cast a strong light upon the other cognate dialects; as the knowledge of any one of the Oriental tongues facilitates, nay almost confers, a mastery over the thousand others, which are less languages of distinct type than dialects of the same speech, offshoots from the same stock. ”

“ To say that a man’s accent betrays his nationality is another way of stating that every language has a home of its own upon the surface of the earth. A word or an accent will thrive or wither like a tree according to region. In the earliest forms of Aryan languages, words for fish or sea appear to be wanting—a want which points to inland origins. The natives of the scorching equatorial lowlands have no word for ice in their dialects. A further glimpse into the past is required for a proper estimate of these facts. Man’s conquest of a region is achieved in two distinct stages. ”

“ On this subject, his range of enquiry was as wide as it was persevering. I finally left the Far East in 1855, before he had entered into the midst of his labours in this direction: yet I had had fair opportunity of seeing his close application to the science of language. All languages were equally attacked by him European, Asian, African, American, and Polynesian—in their glossarial, phonetic and idiomatic phases, and particularly the latter. ”

“ Migration introduces a potent agency of mutation, but a new environment impresses its characteristics upon a language more by a change in the semantic content or meaning of words than by change in their forms. There is another agency of change of profound influence, namely, association with other tongues. When peoples are absorbed by peaceful or militant agencies new materials are brought into their language, and the affiliation of such matter seems to be the chief factor in the differentiation of languages within the same stock. ”

“ In the attempt to classify such phenomena, whether in the historical or in the physical sciences, the conception of development is presented to the student with irresistible force. In the case of the Aryan languages, no one would think of doubting their descent from a common original: just side by side is the parallel case of one sub-group of the Aryan languages, namely, the seven Romance languages which we know to have been developed out of Latin since the Christian era. ”

“ The Celtic, Teutonic, and Slavonic races come before us as groups of mankind marked out by the test of language. Within those races separate nations are again marked out by a stricter application of the test of language. Within the race we may have languages which are clearly akin to each other, but which need not be mutually intelligible. Within the nation we have only dialects which are mutually intelligible, or which, at all events, gather round some one central dialect which is intelligible to all. ”

“ The Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit forms have been added to show the degree of relationship of the Germanic to the cognate groups of the Aryan or Indo-European family of languages. The primitive tongue is understood to be the mother of all, and gives the forms from which linguistic scholars derive those of the most ancient as well as of the modern Aryan dialects. ”

“ English is now becoming the language of the Pacific and of other parts of the world through its use as a lingua franca, which enables natives who speak different languages to converse not only with Europeans but with one another, and I believe that this has often been the mechanism in the past ”

“ The second proposition I should put forward is, that it is only when a new structure is gradually built with new elements on a fresh basis, a new language is evolved; but that this new language, by merely coming in contact with other languages cannot change its own structure, for such change means nothing but death or extinction of that language. The imperceptible slow change with which a new language is developed is by itself a matter for study. ”

“ When (as is by no means improbable) one paramount and exclusive tongue, developed, at first, rapidly and at the expense of the smaller languages of the world, and, subsequently, slowly and at that of the more widely-diffused ones, shall have replaced the still numerous tongues of the nineteenth century; and when all the dialects of the world shall be merged into one Universal Language, the same subject-matter for the study of the structure of Language, its growth and changes, will still exist.
So that the study of Language is one thing, the study of Languages, another. ”

“ No white man has ever penetrated their zealously guarded stronghold that lays between Guatemala, Tabasco, Chiapas and Yucatan, the river Uzumasinta watering part of their territory.
The Maya language seems to be one of the oldest tongues spoken by man, since it contains words and expressions of all, or nearly all, the known polished languages on earth. The name Maya, with the same signification everywhere it is met, is to be found scattered over the different countries of what we term the Old World, as in Central America. ”

“ Consequently the new structure which becomes wholly separate and independent cannot be said to be mixed as a language in the individuated form. No language of this world can coincide with another, for every language has its own separate grammar or structure; but it can be shown that in their growth many languages in India incorporated many foreign elements and had adopted foreign methods of expression. We can only say that no two languages are identical, but as in the case of human races, so in the case of human speeches, absolute purity cannot be thought of. ”

“ Yet a single language, the Chilian, has by itself more affinities with the languages of Europe, than all those mentioned by Vater and others, put together! The foreign or transatlantic affinities of American languages, vary from 10 to 70 per cent, according to the nations. If we suppose that there are 400 languages in America, and as many in the eastern hemisphere, and each to have about 2000 roots or essential words only ”

“ The system of government generally prevailing among the Indian tribes, is indeed so simple and natural, under their circumstances, that it is thought no person would long seek for the traces of any great legislator, giving them laws in any past period. When, however, we consider the curious structure of their languages, we find an ingenuity and complexity, far surpassing any theory to be discovered in that of the modern languages of Europe, with, perhaps, some exceptions in the Basque and Majyer, and even beyond any thing existing in the Greek. ”

“ In this general similarity would be a strong ground-work for a theory of common origin, either indigenous or foreign, but for the fact that while the languages of America appear distinct from all other languages of the world, and do indeed in certain respects bear a general resemblance one to another throughout, yet at the same time I may safely assert that on no other continent can there be found such a multitude of distinct languages which definitely approach one another in scarcely a single word or syllable as in America. ”

“ But, above all, we must better study all the spoken languages and dialects. It is strange that we hardly know anything, and sometimes nothing at all, on the languages of many existing tribes, with whom we have intercourse in both Americas. ”