218 EARLY HISTORY OF MANKIND. 



ideas, leaving the structure undetermined by any but the 

 natural order of connexion. Such is exactly the condition 

 of the Chinese language. 



Crossing the Pacific, we come to the last great family, in 

 the languages of the aboriginal Americans, which have all of 

 them features in common, proving them to constitute a group 

 by themselves, without any regard to the very different degrees 

 of civilization which these nations had attained at the time of 

 the discovery. The common resemblance is in the gram- 

 matical structure as well as in words, and the grammatical 

 structure of this family is of a very peculiar and complicated 

 kind. The general character in this respect has caused the 

 term Polysynthetic to be applied to the American languages. 

 A long many-syllabled word is used by the rude Algonquins 

 and Delawares to express a whole sentence : for example, a 

 woman of the latter nation, playing with a little dog or cat, 

 would perhaps be heard saying, " huligatschis" meaning, 

 " give me your pretty little paw ;" the word, on examination, 

 is found to be made up in this manner : &, the second personal 

 pronoun ; uli, part of the word wulet, pretty ; gat, part of the 

 word wichgat, signifying a leg or paw : schis, conveying the 

 idea of littleness. In the same tongue, a youth is called 

 pilape, a word compounded from the first part of pilsit, inno- 

 cent, and the latter part of lenape, a man. Thus, it will be 

 observed, a number of parts of words are taken and thrown 

 together, by a process which has been happily termed agglu- 

 tination, so as to form one word, conveying a complicated 

 idea. There is also an elaborate system of inflection ; in 

 nouns, for instance, there is one kind of inflection to express 

 the presence or absence of vitality, and another to express' 

 number. The genius of the language has been described as 

 accumulative ; it " tends rather to add syllables or letters, 

 making farther distinctions in objects already before the 

 mind, than to introduce new words." ( 88 ) Yet it has also 

 been shown very distinctly, that these languages are based 

 in words of one syllable, like those of the Chinese and Poly- 

 nesian families ; all the primary ideas are thus expressed : the 



