286 



there is not a single guttural letter or vocal aspirate, 

 a very singular circumstance with an uncivilized 

 people. It is proper to note, that in giving the Chi- 

 lian words the Italian orthography has been adopted. 



All the words of the language terminate in the six 

 vowels heretofore noticed, and in the consonants by 

 d^fy g, /, m, n, r andi^. There are, of course, fif- 

 teen distinct terminations, which, vvdth their variety, 

 render the language sweet and sonorous. The ac- 

 cent is usually placed upon the penultimate vowel, 

 sometimes on the last, but never on the antepenult. 

 The radicals, as far as can be collected from the vo- 

 cabularies, which have been hitherto very imperfect, 

 amount to one thousand nine hundred and seventy- 

 three, and are for the greater part either monosylla- 

 bles or dissyllables. I have made use of the above 

 term in a much more limited sense than many, who 

 improperly call all those words radicals that in any 

 mode produce others. Proceeding upon so false a 

 principle, they make some languages contain thirty 

 or forty thousand roots, which must be considered 

 a grammatical paradox. The roots of a language 

 ai*e those simple primitive expressions, which, nei- 

 ther directly or indirectly derived from any other, 

 produce various words, that afterwards extend them- 

 selves into a variety of different forms. Even in the 

 most copious languages, as the Greek and Latin, 

 the number of these roots is very limited. As far 

 as wc have been able to discover, the radical Chi- 

 lian words have no analogy with those of any other 

 known idiom, though the language contains a num- 



