328 
MIGRATION OS THE ROOTS OF WOODS. 
The American words are written according to the Spanish orthography ^ 
I would not ohange the orthography of the Nootka word onuhzth, tt»Ken 
from Cook's Voyages, to show how much Volney’s idea of introducing 
an uniform notation of sounds is worthy of attention, if not applied 
the languages of the East written without vowels. Tn onulszl h there 
four signs for one single consonant. We have already seen that Am - 
rican nations, speaking languages of a very different structure, call 
sun hv the same name ; that the moon is sometimes called sleeping sun, 
sun of night, light of night; and that sometimes the two orbs have tn 
same denomination. These examples are taken from the Guarany, t 
Omagna, Shawanese, Miami, Maco, and Ojibbeway idioms. Thus in 
Old World, the sun and moon are denoted in Arabic by mrgn f ' 
luminaries:’ thus, in Persian, the most common words, afitah an 
chorschid, are compounds. By the migration of tribes from Asia to 
America, and from America to Asia, a certain number of roots na ^ 
passed from one language into others ; and these roots have been trans 
ported, like the fragments of a shipwreck, far from the coast, into 
islands. {Sun, in New England, /cone; in Tschagatai, koun; in \ akoi » 
fcouini. Star , in Huastec, ot; in Mongol, oddon; in Aztec, citlal, ct > 
in Persian, sitareh. House, in Aztec, calli ; in Wogonl, kualla or kol * 
Water , in Aztec, atel {it els, a river, in Yilela) ; in Mongol, Tscheremis^ 
and Tschouvass, ail, atelch , elel , or idel. Stone, in Caribbce, iebou • ! t 
the Lesgian of Caucasus, teb; in Aztec, tepetl; in Turkish, tepe. FoO(h 
in Quichua, micunnan; in Malay, macannon. Boat, in llaytian, canoa, 
in Ayno, cahani ; in Greenlandisli, kayak ; in Turkish, kayik ; 
Samoyiede, kayouk ; in the Germanic tongues, kahn.) But we ra • 
distinguish from these foreign elements what belongs fundamen a . 
to the American idioms themselves. Such is the effect of time, * 
communication among nations, that the mixture with an heterogen 
language has not only an influence upon roots, but most frequently e ° 
by modifying and denaturalizing grammatical forms. “ When a languag 
resists a regular analysis,” observes William von Humboldt, in his c ^ 
siderations on the Mexican, Cora, Totonac, and Tarahumar tongues, ^ 
may suspect some mixture, some foreign influtsiee j for the faculties 
man, which are, as we may say, reflected in the structure of languag ’ 
and in thei* grammatical forms, act constantly in a regular and uni 
manner .* 5 
