LANGUAGES OF TEE AMERICAN INDIANS 5^5 



is no question but that many Indian languages are extremely polysyn- 

 thetic, uniting into a single word, especially in connection with the 

 verb stem, many elements of expression which in English and even in 

 Latin and Greek have to be expressed by a number of separate words. 

 Thus the English sentence "I will roll it there with my foot" would 

 be expressed in the Washo language, from which the preceding illus- 

 trations have also been drawn, by a single word containing eight syl- 

 lables, and divisible into six distinct elements. 



di-Uwi- lup- gic- ue- hi 

 I- foot-with-roll-thither-will 



What is particularly characteristic of the polysynthetic process as ex- 

 emplified by this word, is that most of the elements as used here can 

 not stand as separate words. They are thus more like our prefixes and 

 suffixes and are more properly word-elements than words in them- 

 selves. Thus if the Washo wishes to say " I," as in answer to the 

 question "Who is it?," he says le; whereas in composition, as in the 

 above long word, " I " is expressed by the prefix di-. The word for 

 " foot '"' is mayop, yet the element or prefix meaning " foot " in a poly- 

 synthetic compound shows no relation whatever to mayop, being liwi. 

 In the same way there or thither as a separate word, as in answer to 

 the question " to where ? " is di; in a compound word the suffix -ue is 

 used. 



It is necessary to observe that some American languages do not show 

 this peculiar polysynthetic character, but it is true that the majority 

 of them do possess it, and that some carry it to an extreme degree, so 

 that with references to the languages as a class, it can not be denied 

 that they tend to be polysynthetic. 



Every variety of grammatical form can, however, be found in the 

 native languages of America, just as they possess a tremendous diver- 

 sity of words and of phonetic characters. Some of the languages are 

 very simple, others very complex. Some can be readily learned and 

 analyzed, others present great obstacles. In spite of all the work that 

 has been done by ethnologists, missionaries and others, the great ma- 

 jority of languages are still practically unknown. They offer a tempt- 

 ing and almost unlimited field of philological research. Their study is 

 urgent because many have become extinct and most of the remainder 

 are fast perishing before the inroads of English or Spanish ; and it is 

 of the utmost importance on account of the aid which it furnishes to 

 history and archeolog>'. Our future knowledge of the history and pre- 

 history of the American Indian will depend more largely on our 

 knowledge of his languages than on any one other thing. 



