Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 1 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
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The Chayma And Tamanac Verbs Have An Enormous Complication Of
Tenses:
Two Presents, four Preterites, three Futures.
This
multiplicity characterises the rudest American languages. Astarloa
reckons, in like manner, in the grammatical system of the Biscayan,
two hundred and six forms of the verb. Those languages, the
principal tendency of which is inflexion, are to the common
observer less interesting than those which seem formed by
aggregation. In the first, the elements of which words are
composed, and which are generally reduced to a few letters, are no
longer recognisable: these elements, when isolated, exhibit no
meaning; the whole is assimilated and mingled together. The
American languages, on the contrary, are like complicated machines,
the wheels of which are exposed to view. The mechanism of their
construction is visible. We seem to be present at their formation,
and we should pronounce them to be of very recent origin, did we
not recollect that the human mind steadily follows an impulse once
given; that nations enlarge, improve, and repair the grammatical
edifice of their languages, according to a plan already determined;
finally, that there are countries, whose languages, institutions,
and arts, have remained unchanged, we might almost say stereotyped,
during the lapse of ages.
The highest degree of intellectual development has been hitherto
found among the nations of the Indian and Pelasgic branch. The
languages formed principally by aggregation seem themselves to
oppose obstacles to the improvement of the mind. They are devoid of
that rapid movement, that interior life, to which the inflexion of
the root is favourable, and which impart such charms to works of
imagination. Let us not, however, forget, that a people celebrated
in remote antiquity, a people from whom the Greeks themselves
borrowed knowledge, had perhaps a language, the construction of
which recalls involuntarily that of the languages of America. What
a structure of little monosyllabic and disyllabic forms is added to
the verb and to the substantive, in the Coptic language! The
semi-barbarous Chayma and Tamanac have tolerably short abstract
words to express grandeur, envy, and lightness, cheictivate, uoite,
and uonde; but in Coptic, the word malice,* metrepherpetou, is
composed of five elements, easy to be distinguished. (* See, on the
incontestable identity of the ancient Egyptian and Coptic, and on
the particular system of synthesis of the latter language, the
ingenious reflexions of M. Silvestre de Sacy, in the Notice des
Recherches de M. Etienne Quatremere sur La Litterature de l'Epypte.
) This compound signifies the quality (met) of a subject (reph),
which makes (er) the thing which is (pet), evil (ou). Nevertheless
the Coptic language has had its literature, like the Chinese, the
roots of which, far from being aggregated, scarcely approach each
other without immediate contact. We must admit that nations once
roused from their lethargy, and tending towards civilization, find
in the most uncouth languages the secret of expressing with
clearness the conceptions of the mind, and of painting the emotions
of the soul. Don Juan de la Rea, a highly estimable man, who
perished in the sanguinary revolutions of Quito, imitated with
graceful simplicity some Idylls of Theocritus in the language of
the Incas; and I have been assured, that, excepting treatises on
science and philosophy, there is scarcely any work of modern
literature that might not be translated into the Peruvian.
The intimate connection established between the natives of the New
World and the Spaniards since the conquest, have introduced a
certain number of American words into the Castilian language. Some
of these words express things not unknown before the discovery of
the New World, and scarcely recall to our minds at present their
barbarous origin.* (* For example savannah, and cannibal.) Almost
all belong to the language of the great Antilles, formerly termed
the language of Haiti, of Quizqueja, or of Itis.* (* The word Itis,
for Haiti or St. Domingo (Hispaniola), is found in the Itinerarium
of Bishop Geraldini (Rome 1631.) - "Quum Colonus Itim insulam
cerneret.") I shall confine myself to citing the words maiz,
tabaco, canoa, batata, cacique, balsa, conuco, etc. When the
Spaniards, after the year 1498, began to visit the mainland, they
already had words* to designate the vegetable productions most
useful to man, and common both to the islands and to the coasts of
Cumana and Paria. (* The following are Haitian words, in their real
form, which have passed into the Castilian language since the end
of the 15th century. Many of them are not uninteresting to
descriptive botany. Ahi (Capsicum baccatum), batata (Convolvus
batatas), bihao (Heliconia bihai), caimito (Chrysophyllum caimito),
cahoba (Swietenia mahagoni), jucca and casabi (Jatropba manihot);
the word casabi or cassava is employed only for the bread made with
the roots of the Jatropha (the name of the plant jucca was also
heard by Americo Vespucci on the coast of Paria); age or ajes
(Dioscorea alata), copei (Clusia alba), guayacan (Guaiacum
officinale), guajaba (Psidium pyriferum), guanavano (Anona
muricata), mani (Arachis hypogaea), guama (Inga), henequen (was
supposed from the erroneous accounts of the first travellers to be
an herb with which the Haitians used to cut metals; it means now
every kind of strong thread), hicaco (Chrysobalanus icaco), maghei
(Agave Americana), mahiz or maiz (Zea, maize), mamei (Mammea
Americana), mangle (Rhizophora), pitahaja (Cactus pitahaja), ceiba
(Bombax), tuna (Cactus tuna), hicotea (a tortoise), iguana (Lacerta
iguana), manatee (Trichecus manati), nigua (Pulex penetrans),
hamaca (a hammock), balsa (a raft; however balsa is an old
Castilian word signifying a pool of water), barbacoa (a small bed
of light wood, or reeds), canei or buhio (a hut), canoa (a canoe),
cocujo (Elater noctilucus, the fire-fly), chicha (fermented
liquor), macana (a large stick or club, made with the petioles of a
palm-tree), tabaco (not the herb, but the pipe through which it is
smoked), cacique (a chief). Other American words, now as much in
use among the Creoles, as the Arabic words naturalized in the
Spanish, do not belong to the Haitian tongue; for example, caiman,
piragua, papaja (Carica), aguacate (Persea), tarabita, paramo. Abbe
Gili thinks with some probability, that they are derived from the
tongue of some people who inhabited the temperate climate between
Coro, the mountains of Merida, and the tableland of Bogota.
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