EARLY HISTORY OF MANKIND. 



em Asia. The leading features of the Chinese are, its 

 consisting altogether of monosyllables, and being desti- 

 tute of all grammatical forms, except certain arrange- 

 ments and accentuations, which vary the sense of partic- 

 ular worvis: ft is also deficient in some of the consonants 

 most conspicuous in other languages, b, d, r, v, and z; 

 so that this people can scarcely pronounce our speech in 

 such a way as to be intelligible : for example, the word 

 Christus they call Kuliss-ut-oo-suh. The Chinese, strange 

 to say, though they early attained to a remarkable degree 

 of civilization, and have preceded the Europeans in many 

 of the most important inventions, have a language which 

 resembles that of children, or deaf and dumb people. 

 The sentence of short, simple, unconnected words, in 

 which an infant amongst us attempts to express some of 

 its wants and its ideas — the equally broken and difficult 

 terms which the deaf and dumb express by signs, as the 

 following passage in the Lord's Prayer: "Our Father, 

 heaven in, wish your name respect, wish your soul's 

 kingdom providence arrive, wish your will do heaven 

 earth equality," &c. — these are like the discourse of the 

 refined people of the so-called Celestial Empire. An 

 attempt was made by the Abbe Sicard to teach the deaf 

 and dumb grammatical si^ns ; but they persisted in re- 

 stricting themselves to the simple signs of ideas, leaving 

 the structure undetermined by any but the natural order 

 of connexion. Such is exactly the condition of the Chi 

 nese 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 na- 

 tions had attained at the time of the discovery. The 

 common resemblance is in the grammatical 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 Po- 

 lysynthetic to be applied to the American languages. A 

 long many-syllabled word is used by the rude Algon- 

 quins 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, " kuli~ 

 gatschis" meaning, "give me your pretty little paw;" 



