The linguistic classification of the American tribes is at present
imperfect in many regions on account of the incomplete information about
their tongues. A proper comparison of languages or dialects includes
not merely the vocabulary, but the grammatical forms and the phonetic
variations which the vocal elements undergo in passing from one form of
speech to another. In some respects, the morphology is more indicative of
relationship than the lexicon of tongues; and it is in these grammatical
aspects that we are peculiarly poorly off when we approach American
dialects. Yet it is also likely that the tendency of late years has
been to underestimate the significance of merely lexical analogies. The
vocabulary, after all, must be our main stand-by in such an undertaking.
For that reason I have thought it worth while to bring together a short
list of common words and show their renderings in a number of American
tongues. Inasmuch as the languages north of Mexico--those in the
United States and Canada--have been frequently studied and are readily
accessible in published books, I have confined my specimens to the
tongues of the central and southern regions of the continent.
The words I have selected for the vocabulary are those which I think
would be most likely to indicate relationship, when such existed. But
as every comparative linguist is aware, neither these nor any words are
free from the risk of ambiguity and equivocation. Thus, in many languages
there are two or three different terms for “man,” as _homo_, _vir_ or
_male_; “woman” is _wife_ or _female_; “sun” and “moon” are often merely
descriptive terms or synonyms of day, light, night and darkness; the
parts of the body have in American tongues the personal possessive noun
prefixed or suffixed; what is worse, the terms for such may differ with
the person, as in Kechua, where the word for “eye,” “arm,” etc., differ
as it is _my_ or _thy_ eye, etc. “Hand” and “arm,” “foot” and “leg,” are
frequently not discriminated, the corresponding words meaning properly
“upper extremity,” “lower extremity,” etc.; and so on for almost every
word that could be chosen.
The proper inference to draw from these facts is, not that a comparison
of vocabularies is worthless or nearly so, but just the contrary. Where
we find that a short vocabulary, imperfect for the above reasons, and
still more so for the general ignorance of linguistics on the part of
collectors, and the varying values they give to the alphabets employed,
yet reveals identities with others, we are justly authorized to consider
such analogies as highly significant and suggestive of profounder
comparisons.