[15] 



THE 



AFFILIATION OF THE ALGONQUIN 

 LANGUAGES. 



BY JOHN CAMPBELL, M.A., 



Professor of Church History, Presbyterian College, Montreal. 



One of tlie modern schools of philologists has not heeded the 

 scholastic maxim concerning entia, but has shown itself ready to 

 multiply origins indefinitely without cause. Catlin, the artist, who, 

 however, was very far from being a philologist, saw no necessity for 

 showing how the Americans came to America, or that they ever came 

 there at all. And at a conference on American subjects, held some 

 three years ago, the President of the Anthropological Society of Paris 

 found a warm reception for the statement, that the true solution of 

 the question concerning the peopling of America is that the Americana 

 are neither Hiadoos, nor Phoenicians, nor Chinese, nor Europeans — 

 they are Americans. An exception has been almost universally made 

 in favour of the Esquimaux families of the far north, whose relations, 

 physical and linguistic, with the Aleutan islanders and the Asiatic 

 Tchiiktchi are too striking to permit denial. In order to maintain 

 the independent origin of the American tribes, it has been found 

 necessary to deny the existence of any true likeness between the 

 languages of the Old World and those of the New. The pecuUar 

 agglutination or synthetical character of American grammar, which, 

 from the Athabascan area of the north to the Fuegian in the south, 

 presents innumerable shades and broad lines of diflPerence, has been 

 represented as without parallel on the Eastern continent. Yet there 

 are synthetic languages in Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia and the 

 Islands of the Sea. At one time the Indo-European and Semitic 

 grammars were the only systems compared with those of other families 

 of speech. To these the Ural-Altaic, comprising the Ugrian of 

 Europe and the Tartar-Mongolian of Asia, and the Monosyllabic, repre- 



