To these four indigenous tongues (the Mexican of Nicaragua being
dealt with as a foreign tongue), what have we to say in the way of
classification?
It is safe to say that the Nagrandan, Dirian, and Woolwa, are more like
each other than they are to the Mosca, Mosquito, or Waikna. And this
is important, since, when Froebel collected the Woolwa vocabulary, he
found a tradition of their having come originally from the shores of
Lake Managua; this being a portion of the Dirian and Nagrandan area. If
so; the classification would be,--
_a._ Dirian, Nagrandan, and Chontal, or Woolwa (Wúlwa)
_b._ Mosquito, or Waikna.
The value of these two divisions is, of course, uncertain; and, in the
present state of our knowledge, it would be premature to define it.
Equally uncertain is the value of the subdivisions of the first class.
All that can be said is, that out of four mutually unintelligible
tongues, three seem rather more allied to each other than the fourth.
Besides the vocabulary of the Nagrandan of Mr. Squier, there is a
grammatical sketch by Col. Francesco Diaz Zapata.
_Veragua_--We pass now from the researches of Mr. Squier in Nicaragua
to those of Mr. B. Seemann, Naturalist to the Herald, for the Isthmus
of Panama. The statement of Colonel Galindo, in the Journal of the
Geographical Society, that the native Indian languages of Honduras,
Nicaragua, San Salvador, and Costarica, had been replaced by the
Spanish, has too implicitly been adopted; by no one, however, more so
than the present writer. The same applies to Veragua.