150 



EARLY HISTORY OF MANKIND. 



the word, on examination, is found to be made up in this 



manner: k, the second personal pronoun ; uli, part of the 

 word wulet, pretty; gat, part of the word wichgat, sig 

 nifying a leg or paw ; schis, conveying the idea of little- 

 ness. In the same tongue, a youth is called pilape, 3 

 word compounded from the first part of pilsit, innocent, 

 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 agglutination, 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 numbers. The genius of the lan- 

 guage has been described as accumulative: it "tends 

 rather to add syllables or letters, making further distinc- 

 tions in objects already before the mind, than to introduce 

 new words."* Yet it has also been shown very distinctly 

 that these languages are based in words of one syllable, 

 like those of the Chinese and Polynesian families ; all the 

 primary ideas are thus expressed : the elaborate system 

 of inflection and agglutination is shown to be simply a 

 further development of the language-forming principle, 

 as it may be called — or the Chinese system may be de- 

 scribed as an arrestment of this principle at a particular 

 early point. It has been fully shown that between the 

 structure of the American and other families sufficient 

 affinities exist to make a common origin or early connex- 

 ion extremely likely. The verbal affinities are also very 

 considerable. Humboldt says, " In eighty-three Ameri- 

 can languages examined by Messrs. Barton and Vater, 

 one hundred and seventy words have been found, the 

 roots of which appear to be the same ; and it is easy to 

 perceive that this analogy is not accidental, since it does 

 not rest merely upon imitative harmony, or on that con- 

 formity of organs which produces almost a perfect iden- 

 tity in the first sounds articulated by children. Of these 

 one hundred and seventy words which have this con- 

 nexion, three-fifths resemble the Manchou, the Tongouse, 

 the Mongal, and the Samoyed ; and two-fifths, the Celtic 

 and Tchoud, the Biscayan, the Coptic and Congo lan- 

 guages These words have been found by comparing 



* Schoolcraft. 



