1885.1 riZo [Brinton, 



and "food;" che cam ai-pola, "I wish to eat," literally "my 

 food I wish." 



In the Mexican, the infinitive is incorporated in the verb as an 

 accusative, and the verb is put in the future of the person 

 spoken of. 



Many writers continue to maintain that a criterion of rank of 

 a language is its lexicographical richness— the number of words 

 it possesses. Even very recently', Prof. Max Midler has applied 

 such a test to American languages, and, finding that one of the 

 Fuegian dialects is reported to have nearly thirty thousand 

 words, he maintains that this is a proof that these savages are a 

 degenerate remnant of some much more highly developed ances- 

 try. Founding his opinion largely on similar facts, Alexander 

 von Humboldt applied the expression to the American nations 

 that they are " des debris e'chappes a un naufrage commun." 



Such, however, was not the opinion of his brother Wilhelm 

 He sounded the depths of linguistic philosophy far more deeply 

 than to accept mere abundance of words as proof of richness in 

 a language. Many savage languages have twenty words signi- 

 fj'ing to eat particular things, but no word meaning " to eat " in 

 general ; the Eskimo language has different words for fishing for 

 each kind of fish, but no word "to fish," in a general sense. 

 Such apparent richness is, in fact, actual poverty. 



Humboldt taught that the quality, not merely the quantity, of 

 words was the decisive measure of verbal wealth. Such quality 

 depends on the relations of concrete words, on the one hand, to 

 the primitive objective perceptions at their root, and, on the 

 other, to the abstract general ideas of which they are particular 

 representatives ; and besides this, on the relations which the 

 spoken word, the articulate sound, bears to the philosophic laws 

 of the formation of language in general.* 



In his letter to Abel-Remusat he discusses the theory that the 

 American languages point to a once higher condition of civiliza- 

 tion, and are the corrupted idioms of deteriorated races. He de- 

 nies that there is linguistic evidence of any such theory. These 



* His teachings on this point, of which I give the barest outline, are developed 

 in sections 12 and i;! of his Introduction, Ueber die Verschiedenheit, etc Stein- 

 thal's critical remarks oa these sections (in his Charaklerislik der haupt. Typen 

 des Sprachbauen) seem to me unsatisfactory, and he even does not appear to 

 grasp the chain of Humboldt's reasoning. 



