LANGUAGES OF THE AMERICAN INDIANS 5" 



much simpler, and whose knowledge more confined, should be content 

 with an exceedingly small vocabulary. 



It is, however, certain that the figures just cited are very erroneous. 

 If any one who considers himself an average person will sit down and 

 make a list or rough estimate of his speaking vocabulary, he will find it 

 to be far above a thousand. It may safely be said that the so-called 

 " average man " knows, and on occasion uses, the names of at least a 

 thousand different things ; in other words, that his vocabulary possesses 

 more than a thousand nouns alone. To these must be added the verbs, 

 of which every one employs at least several hundred; adjectives; pro- 

 nouns ; and the other parts of speech, the short and familiar words that 

 are absolutely indispensable to all conununication in any language. It 

 may be safely estimated that it is an exceptionally ignorant and stupid 

 person in any civilized country that has not at his command a vocabu- 

 lary of at least two thousand words, and probably the figure in the 

 normal case is a great deal higher. 



When any one has professed to declare on the strength of his ob- 

 servation that a particular Indian language consists of only a few 

 hundred terms, he has displayed chiefly his ignorance. He has either 

 not taken the trouble to exhaust the vocabulary, or has not known how 

 to do so. It is true that the traveler or settler can usually converse 

 with natives to the satisfaction of his own needs with a knowledge of 

 only two or three hundred words. Even the missionary can do a great 

 deal with this stock if it is properly chosen. But of course it does not 

 follow that because the white man in most cases has not learned more 

 of a language, that there is no more. On this point the testimony of 

 the philologist or student, who has made it his business to learn all the 

 language as nearly as may be, is the only evidence that can be con- 

 sidered. 



If now we review the Indian languages that have been most thor- 

 oughly explored, so to speak, and of which dictionaries are in existence 

 that are even tolerably representative, as of Aztec, Maya, Algonkin, 

 Eskimo, Sioux and several other idioms, it is found that all of these 

 contain 5,000 words, and some considerably exceed this number. What 

 is more, we discover that professions of an incomplete knowledge of a 

 language usually come from the very men who have compiled these 

 dictionaries or who have given years to the study of a language. It is 

 the old story that it is only by increased information that one obtains 

 a perception of one's ignorance. The words are there in the Indian 

 languages; it is only when we have learned several thousand that we 

 begin to realize how many there must still be which are unrecorded. 

 It may safely be said that every American Indian language, whether or 

 not it has yet been studied, possessed before coming in contact with 

 white civilization a vocabulary of at least 5,000 different native words. 



