3. The Cholo, widely spread in New Grenada. This is the same as Dr.
Cullen's Yule.
Specimens of the San Blas, or Manzanillo Indians, are still
desiderated, it being specially stated that the number of tribes is not
less than four, and the four languages belonging to them as different.
All that can at present be said of the specimens before us is, that
they have miscellaneous, but no exact and definite affinities.
_Mexicans of Nicaragua._ From the notice of these additions to our
_data_ for Central America in the way of raw material, we proceed to
certain speculations suggested by the presence of the Mexicans of
Nicaragua in a locality so far south of the city of Mexico as the banks
and islands of the lake of that name.
First as to their designation. It is not _Astek_ (or _Asteca_), as was
that of the allied tribes of Mexico. Was it native, or was it only the
name which their neighbours gave them? Was it a word like _Deutsch_
(applied to the population of Westphalia, Oldenburg, the Rhine
districts, &c.), or a word like _German_ and _Allemand_? Upon this
point no opinion is hazarded.
Respecting, however, the word _Astek_ (_Asteca_) itself, the present
writer commits himself to the doctrine that it was _no_ native name at
all, and that it was a word belonging to the _Maya_, and foreign to
the Mexican, class of languages. It was as foreign to the latter as
_Welsh_ is to the language of the British Principality; as _German_ or
_Allemagne_ to the High and Low Dutch forms of speech; as _barbarus_ to
the languages in contact with the Latin and Greek, but not themselves
either one or the other.
On the other hand, it was a Maya word, in the way that _Welsh_ and
_German_ are English, and in the way that _Allemand_ is a French one.
It was a word belonging to the country into which the Mexicans
intruded, and to the populations upon which they encroached. These
called their invaders _Asteca_, just as the Scotch Gael calls an
Englishman, a _Saxon_.
_a._ The form is Maya, the termination-_eca_ being common whereever any
form of the Maya speech is to be found.
_b._ It is too like the word _Huasteca_ to be accidental. Now,
_Huasteca_ is the name of a language spoken in the parts about Tampico;
a language separated in respect to its geographical position from the
other branches of the Maya family, (for which Guatemala and Yucatan
are the chief localities) but not separated (as is indicated in the
_Mithridates_) from these same Maya tongues philologically. Hence
_Huasteca_ is a Maya word; and what _Huasteca_ is, _Asteca_ is likely
to be.
The isolation of the _Huasteca_ branch of the Maya family indicates
invasion, encroachment, conquest, displacement; the invaders, &c. being
the Mexicans, called by themselves by some name hitherto undetermined,
but by the older occupants of the country, _Astek_.
It is believed, too, though this is more or less of an _obiter dictum_,
that nine-tenths of the so-called Mexican civilization, as indicated
by its architecture, &c., was Maya, _i. e._ was referable to the
old occupants rather than to the new invaders; standing in the same
relation to that of the Mexicans, strictly speaking, as that of Italy
did to that of the Goths and Lombards.
Whence came these invaders? The evidence of the _phonetic_ part of the
language points to the parts about Quadra and Vancouver's Island, and
to the populations of the Upper Oregon--populations like the Chinuk,
the Salish, the Atna, &c. Here, for the first time, we meet with
languages where the peculiar phonesis of the Mexican language, the
preponderance of the sound expressed by _tl_, reappears. For all the
intermediate parts, with one or two exceptions, the character of the
phonesis is Maya, _i. e._ soft, vocalic, and marked by the absence of
those harsh elements that characterize the Mexican, the Chinuk, and the
Atna equally. The extent to which the glossarial evidence agrees with
the phonetic has yet to be investigated, the doctrine here indicated
being a suggestion rather than aught else.
So is the doctrine that both the Nicaraguan and Mexican invasions
were _maritime_. Strange as this may sound in the case of an ordinary
American population, it should not do so in the case of a population
deduced from the Chinuk and Salish areas and from the archipelago to
the north of Quadra's and Vancouver's Island. However, it is not the
fact itself that is of so much value. The principle involved in its
investigation is weightier. This is, that the distribution of an allied
population, _along a coast_, _and at intervals_, is _primâ facie_
evidence of the ocean having been the path along which they moved.