Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 2 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
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Females Introduced By Degrees Words
Of A Foreign Language Into The Caribbee; And, As The Girls Followed
The Occupations Of The Women Much More Than The Boys, A Language Was
Formed Peculiar To The Women.
I shall record in this note the names of
the sun and moon in a great number of American and Asiatic idioms,
again reminding the reader of the uncertainty of all judgments founded
merely on the comparison of solitary words.
The American words are written according to the Spanish orthography. I
would not change the orthography of the Nootka word onulszth, taken
from Cook's Voyages, to show how much Volney's idea of introducing an
uniform notation of sounds is worthy of attention, if not applied to
the languages of the East written without vowels. In onulszth there
are four signs for one single consonant. We have already seen that
American nations, speaking languages of a very different structure,
call the sun by the same name; that the moon is sometimes called
sleeping sun, sun of night, light of night; and that sometimes the two
orbs have the same denomination. These examples are taken from the
Guarany, the Omagua, Shawanese, Miami, Maco, and Ojibbeway idioms.
Thus in the Old World, the sun and moon are denoted in Arabic by
niryn, the luminaries; thus, in Persian, the most common words, afitab
and chorschid, are compounds. By the migration of tribes from Asia to
America, and from America to Asia, a certain number of roots have
passed from one language into others; and these roots have been
transported, like the fragments of a shipwreck, far from the coast,
into the islands. (Sun, in New England, kone; in Tschagatai, koun; in
Yakout, kouini. Star, in Huastec, ot; in Mongol, oddon; in Aztec,
citlal, citl; in Persian, sitareh. House, in Aztec, calli; in Wogoul,
kualla or kolla. Water, in Aztec, atel (itels, a river, in Vilela); in
Mongol, Tscheremiss, and Tschouvass, atl, atelch, etel, or idel.
Stone, in Caribbee, tebou; in the Lesgian of Caucasus, teb; in Aztec,
tepetl; in Turkish, tepe.
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