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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Travellers Cannot Be
Enough On Their Guard Against This Officious Assent, When They Seek
To Confirm Their Own Opinions By The Testimony Of The Natives.
To
put an Indian alcalde to the proof, I asked him one day, whether he
did not think the little river of Caripe, which issues from the
cavern of the Guacharo, returned into it on the opposite side by
some unknown entrance, after having ascended the slope of the
mountain.
The Indian seemed gravely to reflect on the subject, and
then answered, by way of supporting my hypothesis: "How else, if it
were not so, would there always be water in the bed of the river at
the mouth of the cavern?"
The Chaymas are very dull in comprehending anything relating to
numerical facts. I never knew one of these people who might not
have been made to say that he was either eighteen or sixty years of
age. Mr. Marsden observed the same peculiarity in the Malays of
Sumatra, though they have been civilized more than five centuries.
The Chayma language contains words which express pretty large
numbers, yet few Indians know how to apply them; and having felt,
from their intercourse with the missionaries, the necessity of so
doing, the more intelligent among them count in Spanish, but
apparently with great effort of mind, as far as thirty, or perhaps
fifty. The same persons, however, cannot count in the Chayma
language beyond five or six. It is natural that they should employ
in preference the words of a language in which they have been
taught the series of units and tens. Since learned Europeans have
not disdained to study the structure of the idioms of America with
the same care as they study those of the Semitic languages, and of
the Greek and Latin, they no longer attribute to the imperfection
of a language, what belongs to the rudeness of the nation. It is
acknowledged, that almost everywhere the Indian idioms display
greater richness, and more delicate gradations, than might be
supposed from the uncultivated state of the people by whom they are
spoken. I am far from placing the languages of the New World in the
same rank with the finest languages of Asia and Europe; but no one
of these latter has a more neat, regular, and simple system of
numeration, than the Quichua and the Aztec, which were spoken in
the great empires of Cuzco and Anahuac. It is a mistake to suppose
that those languages do not admit of counting beyond four, because
in villages where they are spoken by the poor labourers of Peruvian
and Mexican race, individuals are found, who cannot count beyond
that number. The singular opinion, that so many American nations
reckon only as far as five, ten, or twenty, has been propagated by
travellers, who have not reflected, that, according to the genius
of different idioms, men of all nations stop at groups of five,
ten, or twenty units (that is, the number of the fingers of one
hand, or of both hands, or of the fingers and toes together); and
that six, thirteen, or twenty are differently expressed, by
five-one, ten-three, and feet-ten.* (* Savages, to express great
numbers with more facility, are in the habit of forming groups of
five, ten, or twenty grains of maize, according as they reckon in
their language by fives, tens, or twenties.) Can it be said that
the numbers of the Europeans do not extend beyond ten, because we
stop after having formed a group of ten units?
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