Introduction to the Study of Indian Languages

Abstract

THIS is one of the most useful of the many useful works issued under Mr. Powell's able management by the ethnological bureau of the Smithsonian Institution. It was originally published in 1877, and it is satisfactory to find that another edition has so soon been called for. At the same time one cannot but regret that this opportunity was not taken to somewhat modify the title, which, as it stands, is apt to deceive the unwary. The book is in no sense an abstract treatise on the nature, structure, or classification of the American languages, either regarded independently or in relation to other forms of speech. It has nothing to do with the philosophy, or even with the grammar of these idioms taken collectively or individually. Its object, if less ambitious, is perhaps far more useful in the present state of these studies. American philologists have confessedly shown a disposition to dogmatise on the morphology of the native idioms, and have indulged in some very wild speculation on utterly insufficient data regarding their origin, development, and affinities, The old school of etymologists, who held that Eliot's Massachusetts Bible was merely a thinly disguised form of Welsh, that Delaware and Lapp were first cousins, and that Basque sailors stranded on the Brazilian seaboard could hold converse with the Tupinambas and other Guarani peoples of that region, has had its day. But it has been succeeded by another, which, if slightly more cautious, is scarcely less extravagant, and which, notwithstanding the warning voice of science, still flourishes in both hemispheres. It will suffice here to refer to the astonishing theories seriously advocated by the late Abbé Brasseur de Bourbourg on the relations of the Maya-Quiché and Aryan families, by the Abbé Petitot on the Athabascan and Chinese, and quite recently by Mr. John Campbell of Montreal on “The Hittites in America.” “The Aleutans and Barabra,” writes the last-mentioned authority, “agree in being worshippers of the sun like other Hittites, in the manufacture of red waterproof leather, and in their manner of adorning the head. … Physical ethnology would never have dreamt of uniting white Basques and Circassians, black Nubians, yellow Japanese, and red American Indians; but philology, which knows no colour but that of words and constructions, makes them one. It may be that in the Barabra we shall yet find the purest surviving form of the ancient Hittite language. Some of its numerals help to connect those of the Peruvian dialects with other Hittite forms. One thing more surprising perhaps than such insanities is their appearance in the pages of a professedly scientific journal (The Canadian Naturalist and Quarterly Journal of Science for August, 1880, p. 359).

Introduction to the Study of Indian Languages.

By J. W. Powell. Second Edition. (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1880.)

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