SCIENCE. 



[Vol. XIX. No. 466 



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THE ELAMA.TH NATION.' 

 II . — Linguistics . 

 When, early in the present century, the American lan- 

 guages, or rather a certain number of them, and particularly 

 those of the Algonkian, Troquoian, Mexican, Peruvian, and 

 Araucanian families, became the subjects of soienti6c study, 

 the first emotions which this study excited were those of 

 surprise and pleasure. The elaborate forms, the many in- 

 genious methods of word-composition, and the singular 

 capacity for expression thence derived, filled the first in- 

 quirers with admiration. This admiration, expressed with 

 the enthusiasm of discoverers, naturally awakened scepticism 

 and adverse criticism. The criticism, originating mainly in 

 prejudice and the pride of race, and based on that partial 

 knowledge which is sometimes more misleading than igno- 

 rance, was for the most part unfounded and unjust. The 

 critics objected that the American languages, being those of 

 barbarous tribes, must necessarily be inferior to the idioms 

 of highly civilized races, like the Aryan and Semitic nations; 

 but they forgot that the early Aryans and Semites were 

 themselves barbarians, and yet their languages^ as we know 

 from many facts, were as well constructed and as expressive 

 in their era of barbarism as in that of their highest culture. 

 The objectors also informed us that the reason why the words of 

 the American languages were of such elaborate formation and 

 ofien excessive length, was simply because the speakers, being 

 barbarians, had not attained the analyzing power required to 

 reduce the vocables to their component parts; but further in- 

 vestigations have shown that many American languages, 

 including the Dakota, the Maya, and the Othomi tongues, 

 are in some respects even more analytic than the Aryan, and 

 their words generally briefer. We were further told that the 

 American idioms had not the substantive verb, which, we 

 were assured, was the highest expression of Aryan and 

 Semitic analysis and abstraction. But later researches have 

 found this verb in the Athapascan, the Sahaptin, the Kla- 

 math, and various other Indian tongues, as fully developed 

 as in the Sanscrit or the Greek. Then we were assured that 



1 The first article — on the " Klamath Country and People " — appeared in 

 the last number of Science. The third and concluding article — on " Klamath 

 Mythology and General Ethnolcgy " — will appear In Ihe nest Issue. 



American languages had few or no expressions for abstract 

 ideas. We now find that some of them abound in such ex- 

 pressions, and have peculiar forms especially designed to 

 indicate them. The objectors derided certain Indian lan- 

 guages, like the Iroquoian and the Algonkian, in which the 

 terms of kindred must always have a possessive pronoun at- 

 tached to them. How poor, they argued, must be the speech 

 of a people who cannot say simply "father" and "son," but 

 must always employ the composite forms, "my father," 

 "his son," and the like. We now know that languages of 

 this type are not universal, and that in idioms spoken by 

 tribes lower in culture than the Algonkians and the Iroquois, 

 the possessive pronouns are independent words, and are never- 

 attached to the nouns. Finally, these critics, all of Aryan 

 or Semitic origin, proudly assure us that the noble races to 

 which they belong are the only peoples whose languages are 

 really inflected. All other idioms belong to a lower type, 

 the "agglutinative." Their so called inflections are simply 

 bits of significant words, affixed to the roots, and still retaining 

 indications of their origin. Duj>onceau, the first and greatest 

 of American philologists, has long ago shown, by the evi- 

 dence of the Delaware grammar, the error of this assumption ; 

 and we now have to .see how completely this and most of the 

 other objections of the worshippers of the Aryo Semitic fetish 

 are disproved by the results of Mr. Gatschet's careful and 

 thorough studies. 



Pure inflection, properly speaking, — that is, inflection of 

 non-agglutinative origin, — is a change made in the substan- 

 tial or radical part of a word to indicate a difference of mean- 

 ing, as when the Hebrew changes the ground form of lamar, 

 to learn (or " he learned"), to lemor, to express the impera- 

 tive mood, or as when the Ojibway, to form the participle, 

 changes nimi, he dances, to natnid, dancing. In the primitive 

 Aryan languages the most important change of this descrip- 

 tion is the reduplicative form, which in the Sanscrit, Greek, 

 and Gothic, and occasionally in the Latin and other tongues, 

 is used to give a preterite signification. Tnis form of inflec- 

 tion occurs, with varying purport, in many American and 

 Oceanic languages. Most generally it indicates plurality, as in 

 the Mexican and Sahaptin ic'ioms; but frequently it expresses 

 (as in the Japanese and the Dakota) iteration, distribu- 

 tion, or other allied meanings. In the Klamath it assumes 

 a wide development, pervading the whole language, and 

 modifying almost all the parts of speech, from nouns and 

 verbs even to many of the particles. Its principal functions, 

 according to Mr. Gatschet, are iterative and distributive. 

 But the various modiScations of meaning produced by re- 

 doubling the first syllable or the first two syllables of a word, 

 with many euphonic changes, give nice distinctions, which 

 enrich the language to a remarkable extent. Thus from 

 lama, to be dizzy, we have lemlema. to re^l or stagger; from 

 palah or pelah, quickly, pelpela, to work, to busy oneself 

 at; from tueka, to pierce, tueMueka, to stare at, i.e., ta 

 pierce with the eyes; from ivita, to blow (as the wind , 

 witwita, to shake or struggle; from mukash, fine feathers or 

 down of birds, mukmukli, downy, soft. The verb lutatka, 

 to interpret, makes its frequentative mood by an abridged 

 reduplication, lultatka, to interpret frequently, and hence we 

 have the noun lulfatkuish, a professional interpreter. Sa 

 from shiukish, one who fights, a derivative of the verb 

 shiuka, to fight, we have, by a twofold reduplication, shish- 

 o'kish, a warrior, and shish'shokish, a hero, one who has- 

 foughtin many battles; and, in like manner, from tamnuish, 

 one who is travelling (a derivative from tdmenu, to travel), 

 we have tatamnuish, one who travels habitually, a stroller 



