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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Appropriating To Themselves These Languages, The Grammatical Forms
Of Which Are Very Regular, And Almost As Fixed As Those Of The
Greek And Sanscrit, The Missionaries Would Place Themselves In More
Intimate Connection With The Natives Whom They Govern.
The
numberless difficulties which occur in the system of a Mission
consisting of Indians of ten or a dozen different nations would
disappear with the confusion of idioms.
Those which are little
diffused would become dead languages; but the Indian, in preserving
an American idiom, would retain his individuality - his national
character. Thus by peaceful means might be effected what the Incas
began to establish by force of arms.
How indeed can we be surprised at the little progress made by the
Chaymas, the Caribbees, the Salives, or the Otomacs, in the
knowledge of the Spanish language, when we recollect that one white
man, one single missionary, finds himself alone amidst five or six
hundred Indians? and that it is difficult for him to establish
among them a governador, an alcalde, or a fiscal, who may serve him
as an interpreter? If, instead of the missionary system, some other
means of civilization were substituted, if, instead of keeping the
whites at a distance, they could be mingled with the natives
recently united in villages, the American idioms would soon be
superseded by the languages of Europe, and the natives would
receive in those languages the great mass of new ideas which are
the fruit of civilization. Then the introduction of general
tongues, such as that of the Incas, or the Guaranos, without doubt
would become useless. But after having lived so long in the
Missions of South America, after having so closely observed the
advantages and the abuses of the system of the missionaries, I may
be permitted to doubt whether that system could be easily
abandoned, though it is doubtless very capable of being improved,
and rendered more conformable with our ideas of civil liberty. To
this it may be answered, that the Romans* succeeded in rapidly
introducing their language with their sovereignty into the country
of the Gauls, into Boetica, and into the province of Africa. (* For
the reason of this rapid introduction of Latin among the Gauls, I
believe we must look into the character of the natives and the
state of their civilization, and not into the structure of their
language. The brown-haired Celtic nations were certainly different
from the race of the light-haired Germanic nations; and though the
Druid caste recalls to our minds one of the institutions of the
Ganges, this does not demonstrate that the idiom of the Celts
belongs, like that of the nations of Odin, to a branch of the
Indo-Pelasgic languages. From analogy of structure and of roots,
the Latin ought to have penetrated more easily on the other side of
the Danube, than into Gaul; but an uncultivated state, joined to
great moral inflexibility, probably opposed its introduction among
the Germanic nations.) But the natives of these countries were not
savages; - they inhabited towns; they were acquainted with the use
of money; and they possessed institutions denoting a tolerably
advanced state of cultivation.
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