86 DANIEL WILSON ON THE HUEON-IEOQUOIS OP 



the discrimiuatiug refinements of grammar, and the choice of terms which au ample 

 vocabulary supplies. The holox)hrastic element has been noted as a peculiar characteristic 

 of American languages. The word-sentences thus constructed not only admitted of, but 

 encouraged, an elaborate nicety of discrimination ; while the marked tendency of the 

 process, so far as the language itself is concerned, was to absorb all other parts in the verb. 

 Time, jjlace, manner, aim, purpose, degree, and all the other modifications of language are 

 combined polysynthetically with the root. Nouns are to a large extent verbal forms ; and 

 not only nouns and adjectives, but adverbs and j)repositions, are regularly conjugated. 

 Elaborated polysyllables, flexibly modified by systematic internal changes, give expression, 

 in one compounded word-sentence, to every varying phase of intricate reasoning or emotion ; 

 and the complex structure shows the growth of a language in habitual use for higher 

 purposes than the mere daily wants of life. The vocabvilary in use in some rural districts 

 in England has been found to include less than three hundred words ; and in provincial 

 dialects, thus restricted, the refinements of grammatical expression disappear. Among 

 such rustic communities speech plays a very subordinate part in the business of life. 

 But upon the deliberations of the Indian Council House depended the whole action of 

 the confederacy. Hence, while in all else the Iroquois remained an untutored savage, his 

 language is a marvellously systematized and beautiful structure, well adapted to the 

 requirements of intricate reasoning and persuasive subtlety. 



ProfessorWhitneysays, in reference to American languages generally, what may more 

 especially be applied to the Huron-Iroquois: "There are infinite jiossibilities of expressive- 

 ness in such a structure ; and it would only need that some native- American G-reek race 

 should arise, to fill it full of thought and fancy, and put it to the uses of a noble literature, 

 and it would be rightly admired as rich and flexible, perhaps, beyond anything else that 

 the world knew." ' Yet, on the other hand, the Iroquois disijense with the whole labials, 

 never articulate with their lips, and throw entirely aside from their alphabetical series 

 of phonetics six of those most constantly in use by us. 



In this direction, then, lies the ethnological problem which cannot fail to awaken 

 ever increasing interest ; and to which I am anxious to direct, in some special degree, the 

 energies of this section of the Royal Society of Canada. To the native languages we must 

 look for a true key to the solution of some of the most curious and difficult questions 

 involved in the peopling of this continent. '• There lies before us," says Professor 

 Whitney, " a vast and complicated problem in the Ainerican races ; and it is their 

 language that must do by far the greatest part of the work in solving it." 



Of the languages of the Hiiron-Iroquois, the Huron appears to be the oldest, if not the 

 parent stock. "When this aggressive race had spread, as conquerors, far to the south of the 

 St. Lawrence, the mother nation appears to have held on to the cradle land of the race, 

 where its representatives were found still in possession when the first European explorers 

 entered the St. Lawrence in the sixteenth century. Colonists, of French or English origin, 

 have been in more or less intimate intercourse with them CA'er since, yet the materials for 

 any satisfactory study of the Huron language, or of a comparison between it and the 

 A'arioiis Iroquois dialects, are still scanty and A'ery inadequate. The languages of the Five 

 Nations that originally constituted the members of the Iroquois league, are, in the strictest 



^ Life and Growth of Language, p. 261. 



