THIRTEENTH ORDINARY MEETING. ieee 
Lesghian hueta and the Basque zuaitz. The Yukahiri has conformed 
to the Lesghian dzu/ in tshal; and the Georgian, with its che, tha, 
and tcheka, more nearly approaches the Yuma and other American 
forms. Still ¢tled, djitsha and zeli are thoroughly Khitan in character, 
answering to the Circassian z/a, the Basque zwhatsa, and the Lesghian 
dzul and Yukahiri tsha/. Such examples suffice to show how diffi- 
cult it must be to gain a thorough acquaintance with the structure of 
our American languages, without having reference to the stock from 
which they are derived, as well as the paramount value of these 
languages in all matters affecting the construction of the Basque and 
Caucasian, the Siberian and Japanese tongues. 
Whether the Aztec é/ was an original element in Hittite speech, or 
a corruption arising after the dispersion in 717 B.C., we shall not 
know definitely until the inscriptions of Syria and Asia Minor, of 
India, Siberia, and Japan, yield a vocabulary of sufficient extent to 
enable us to judge. It is very probable that it existed as a substi- 
tute for r in certain Khitan tribes from a very early period, since, in 
the land of the Nairi, the Assyrian inscriptions mention a town Cit- 
lalli, in which we recognize the Aztec word for star, the equivalents 
for which in Araucanian, Atacameno, Shoshonese, Aino, Lesghian 
and Basque are schalela, halar, shul, zirari, suri, and izarra. The 
land of the Vairi or Nahri, the Naharina of the Egyptian records, 
has been generally regarded as a form of the Semitic Vaharaim, the 
rivers, whence the designation Mesopotamia. But the word is purely 
Turanian, and designates primarily a people, not a country. The 
Egyytian form is the most perfect, as it preserves the medial aspirate 
and retains the Hittite plural in ». It is just the Aztec national 
designation Vahuatl, Nauatl, or Navatl, which, by the application of 
the law of phonetic change, becomes Vahuar, Nauar or Navar. The 
Aztec word means “ that which is well-sounding, or a fluent speaker,” 
but most of the words derived from the same root have either the 
meaning of daw or measure or of interpretation. The fluent speaker 
probably was looked upon as one who spoke with regard to the laws 
of language and in measured tones, and the interpreter as one who 
converted the idiom of barbarians into the well-regulated language of 
the Aztecs. The Japanese preserve the word in two forms, nort, 
meaning law or measure, and naori, translation. In Basque it is 
represented by newrri, measure, and this in all probability is the 
same word as Navarre, a Basque province. As Khupuscai and the 
