Brinton. ] 222 [Oct, 5, 
plainly marked in American tongues that the machinery for con- 
necting sentences is absent. This machinery consists properly of 
the relative pronoun and the conjunction. You will be surprised 
to hear that there is no American language, none that I know, 
which possesses either of these parts of speech. That which does 
duty for the conjunction in the Maya and Nahuatl, for instance, is 
a noun meaning associate or companion, with a prefixed possessive.* 
Equally foreign to primitive speech was any expression of dime 
in connection with verbal forms; in other words, there was no such 
thing as tenses. We are so accustomed to link actions to time, past, 
present, or future, that it is a little difficult to understand how this 
accessory can be omitted in intelligible discourse. It is perfectly 
evident, however, from the study of many American tongues that 
at one period of their growth they possessed for a long interval only 
one tense, which served indifferently for past, present, and future ;+ 
and even yet most of them form the past and future by purely ma- 
terial means, as the addition of an adverb of time, by accent, 
quantity or repetition, and in others the tense relation is still un- 
known. tf 
In some tongues, the Omagua of the upper Orinoco for example, 
there is no sort of connection between the verbal stem and its signs 
ot tense, mode or person. ‘They have not even any fixed order. 
In such languages there is no difference in sound between the words 
for’! marty," and: ‘ my wife;’” ‘1 eat,’’and: ** my, food,’ be- 
tween ‘* Paul dies,’’ ‘‘ Paul died,’’ ‘‘ Paul will die,’’ and ‘‘ Paul is 
dead.”’§ Through such tongues we can distinctly perceive a time 
when the verb had neither tense, mode, nor person; when it was 
not even a verb nor yet a verbal, but an epicene sound which could 
be adapted to any service of speech, 
”? 
* In Maya the conjunction “and” is rendered by yetl, a compound of the possessive. 
pronoun, third person, singular y, and ef, companion. The Nahuatl, ihuan, is precisely 
the same in composition. ‘ 
+ Die meisten amerikanischen Sprachen haben die Eigenthiimlichkeit, dass in der 
Regel die Haupttempora in Anwendung kommen und unter diesen besonders das 
Priisens, selbst wenn von einer bestimmten, besonders aber von einer unbestimmten 
Vergangenheit gesprochen wird, J.J. von Tschudi, Organismus der Khetsua Sprache, s. 
198. The same tense is also employed for future occurrences. What classical gram- 
marians call ‘‘the historical present,” will illustrate this employment of a single tense 
for past and future time. 
{ The Chiquita of Bolivia is an extreme example. ‘La distinction du passé, du pré- 
sent et du futur n’existe pas dans cette langue ¢trange.”’ Arte y Vocabulario dela Lengua 
Chiquita. Por L. Adam, y V. Henry, p. x. 
2 On the Verb in American Languages. By Wilhelm yon Humboldt. Translated by D. 
G. Brinton, in Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 1885. : 
