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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Striking Analogies Of Grammatical Construction Are
Acknowledged, Not Only In The More Perfect Languages, As In That Of
The Incas, The Aymara, The Guarauno, The Mexican, And The Cora, But
Also In Languages Extremely Rude.
Idioms, the roots of which do not
resemble each other more than the roots of the Sclavonic and the
Biscayan, have those resemblances of internal mechanism which are
found in the Sanscrit, the Persian, the Greek, and the German
languages.
Almost everywhere in the New World we recognize a
multiplicity of forms and tenses in the verb,* (* In the Greenland
language, for example, the multiplicity of the pronouns governed by
the verb produces twenty-seven forms for every tense of the
Indicative mood. It is surprising to find, among nations now
ranking in the lowest degree of civilization, this desire of
graduating the relations of time, this superabundance of
modifications introduced into the verb, to characterise the object.
Matarpa, he takes it away: mattarpet, thou takest it away:
mattarpatit, he takes it away from thee: mattarpagit, I take away
from thee. And in the preterite of the same verb, mattara, he has
taken it away: mattaratit, he has taken it away from thee. This
example from the Greenland language shows how the governed and the
personal pronouns form one compound, in the American languages,
with the root of the verb. These slight differences in the form of
the verb, according to the nature of the pronouns governed by it,
is found in the Old World only in the Biscayan and Congo languages
(Vater, Mithridates. William von Humboldt, On the Basque Language).
Strange conformity in the structure of languages on spots so
distant, and among three races of men so different, - the white
Catalonians, the black Congos, and the copper-coloured Americans!)
an ingenious method of indicating beforehand, either by inflexion
of the personal pronouns, which form the terminations of the verb,
or by an intercalated suffix, the nature and the relation of its
object and its subject, and of distinguishing whether the object be
animate or inanimate, of the masculine or the feminine gender,
simple or in complex number. It is on account of this general
analogy of structure, - it is because American languages which have
no words in common (for instance, the Mexican and the Quichua),
resemble each other by their organization, and form complete
contrasts to the languages of Latin Europe, that the Indians of the
Missions familiarize themselves more easily with an American idiom
than with the Spanish. In the forests of the Orinoco I have seen
the rudest Indians speak two or three tongues. Savages of different
nations often communicate their ideas to each other by an idiom not
their own.
If the system of the Jesuits had been followed, languages, which
already occupy a vast extent of country, would have become almost
general. In Terra Firma and on the Orinoco, the Caribbean and the
Tamanac alone would now be spoken; and in the south and south-west,
the Quichua, the Guarano, the Omagua, and the Araucan.
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