Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 1 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
- Page 512 of 779 - First - Home
Those Affixes, By Lengthening Words, Indicate The Most
Varied Relations Of Number, Time, And Motion.
When we reflect on the peculiar structure of the American
languages, we imagine we discover the source of the opinion
generally entertained from the most remote time in the Missions,
that these languages have an analogy with the Hebrew and the
Biscayan.
At the convent of Caripe as well as at the Orinoco, in
Peru as well as in Mexico, I heard this opinion expressed,
particularly by monks who had some vague notions of the Semitic
languages. Did motives supposed to be favourable to religion, give
rise to this extraordinary theory? In the north of America, among
the Choctaws and the Chickasaws, travellers somewhat credulous have
heard the strains of the Hallelujah* of the Hebrews (* L'Escarbot,
Charlevoix, and even Adair (Hist. of the American Indians 1775).);
as, according to the Pundits, the three sacred words of the
mysteries of the Eleusis* (konx om pax) resound still in the
Indies. (* Asiat. Res. volume 5, Ouvaroff on the Eleusinian
Mysteries 1816.) I do not mean to suggest, that the nations of
Latin Europe may have called whatever has a foreign physiognomy
Hebrew or Biscayan, as for a long time all those monuments were
called Egyptian, which were not in the Grecian or Roman style. I am
rather disposed to think that the grammatical system of the
American idioms has confirmed the missionaries of the sixteenth
century in their ideas respecting the Asiatic origin of the nations
of the New World.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 512 of 779
Words from 138918 to 139170
of 211363
