SOME CHARACTERISTICS OF AMERICAN LANGUAGES.[286]

“The difference between these cultivated and those rude languages is chiefly merely one of time, and of the more or less fortunate mixture of dialects; though it certainly also depends in a measure on the original mental powers of the nations.

“Those whose languages we have here analyzed are, in speaking, constantly putting together elementary parts; they connect nothing firmly, because they follow the changing requirements of the moment, joining together only what these requirements demand, and often leave connected through habit that which clear thinking would necessarily divide.

“Hence no just division of words can arise, such as is demanded by accurate and appropriate thought, which requires that each word must have a fixed and certain content and a defined grammatical form, and as is also demanded by the highest phonetic laws.

“Nations richly endowed in mind and sense will have an instinct for such correct divisions; the incessant moving to and fro of elementary parts of speech will be distasteful to them; they will seek true individuality in the words they use; therefore they will connect them firmly, they will not accumulate too much in one, and they will only leave that connected which is so in thought, and not merely in usage or habit.”

Contents.—Study of the human species on the geographic system—Have American languages any common trait?—Duponceau’s theory of polysynthesis—Humboldt on Polysynthesis and Incorporation—Francis Lieber on Holophrasis—Prof. Steinthal on the incorporative plan—Lucien Adam’s criticism of it—Prof. Müller’s inadequate statement—Major Powell’s omission to consider it—Definitions of polysynthesis, incorporation and holophrasis—Illustrations—Critical application of the theory to the Othomi language—To the Bri-bri language—To the Tupi-Guarani dialects—To the Mutsun—Conclusions—Addendum: critique by M. Adam on this essay.

As the careful study of the position of man toward his surroundings advances, it becomes more and more evident that like other members of the higher fauna, he bears many and close correlations to the geographical area he inhabits. Hence the present tendency of anthropology is to return to the classification proposed by Linnæus, which, in a broad way, subdivides the human species with reference to the continental areas mainly inhabited by it in the earliest historic times. This is found to accord with color, and to give five sub-species or races, the White or European, the Blackor African, the Yellow or Mongolian (Asiatic), the Brown or Malayan (Oceanic), and the Red or American Races.

No ethnologist nowadays will seek to establish fixed and absolute lines between these. They shade into one another in all their peculiarities, and no one has traits entirely unknown in the others. Yet, in the mass, the characteristics of each are prominent, permanent and unmistakable; and to deny them on account of occasional exceptions is to betray an inability to estimate the relative value of scientific facts.

Does this racial similarity extend to language? On the surface, apparently not. Only one of the races named—the Malayan—is monoglottic. All the others seem to speak tongues with no genetic relationship, at least none indicated by etymology. The profounder study of language, however, leads to a different conclusion—to one which, as cautiously expressed by a recent writer, teaches that “every large, connected, terrestrial area developed only one, or scarcely more than one, fundamental linguistic type, and this with such marked individuality that rarely did any of its languages depart from the general scheme.”[287]

This similarity is not to be looked for in likeness between words, but in the inner structural development of tongues. To ascertain and estimate such identities is a far more delicate undertaking than to compare columns of words in vocabularies; but it is proportionately more valuable.

Nor should we expect it to be absolute. The example of the Basque in a pure white nation in Western Europe warns us that there are exceptions which, though they may find a historic explanation, forbid us all dogmatic assertion. They are so few, however, that I quote Dr. Winkler’s words as the correct expression of the latest linguistic science, and I wish that some investigator would make it the motto of his study of American tongues.

The task—no light one—which such an investigator would have, would be, first to ascertain what structural traits form the ground plan or plans (if there are more than one) of the languages of the New World. Upon this ground-plan he would find very different edifices have been erected, which, nevertheless, can be classified into groups, each group marked by traits common to every member of it. These traits and groups he must carefully define. Then would come the separate question as to whether this community of traits has a genetic explanation or not. If the decision were affirmative, we might expect conclusions that would carry us much further than etymological comparisons, and might form a scientific basis for the classification of American nations.

Possibly some one or two features might be discovered which though not peculiar to American tongues, nor fully present in every one of them, yet would extend an influence over them all, and impart to them in the aggregate a certain aspect which could fairly be called distinctive. Such features are claimed to have been found in the grammatic processes ofpolysynthesisandincorporation.

Peter Stephen Duponceau, at one time President of theAmerican Philosophical Society, was the first to assert that there was a prevailing unity of grammatic schemes in American tongues. His first published utterance was in 1819, when he distinguished, though not with desirable lucidity, between the two varieties of synthetic construction, the one (incorporation) applicable to verbal forms of expression, the other (polysynthesis) to nominal expressions. His words are—

“Apolysyntheticorsyntacticconstruction of language is that in which the greatest number of ideas are comprised in the least number of words. This is done principally in two ways. 1. By a mode of compounding locutions which is not confined to joining two words together, as in Greek, or varying the inflection or termination of a radical word as in most European languages, but by interweaving together the most significant sounds or syllables of each simple word, so as to form a compound that will awaken in the mind at once all the ideas singly expressed by the words from which they are taken. 2. By an analogous combination [of] the various parts of speech, particularly by means of the verb, so that its various forms and inflections will express not only the principal action, but the greatest possible number of the moral ideas and physical objects connected with it, and will combine itself to the greatest extent with those conceptions which are the subject of other parts of speech, and in other languages require to be expressed by separate and distinct words. Such I take to be the general character of the Indian languages.”[288]

Duponceau’s opinion found an able supporter in Wilhelm von Humboldt, who, as already shown, placed the American languages among those acting on the incorporative plan—das Einverleibungssystem. The spirit of this system he defines to be, “to impress the unity of the sentence on the understanding by treating it, not as a whole composed of various words, but as one word.” A perfect type of incorporation will group all the elements of the sentence in and around the verbal, as this alone is the bond of union between the several ideas. The designation of time and manner, that is, the tense and mode signs, will include both the object and subject of the verb, thus subordinating them to the notion of action. It is “an indispensable basis” of this system that there should be a difference in the form of words when incorporated and when not. This applies in a measure to nouns and verbals, but especially to pronouns, and Humboldt names it as “the characteristic tendency” of American languages, and one directly drawn from their incorporative plan, that the personal pronouns, both subjective and objective, used in connection with the verbs, are of a different form from the independent personal pronouns, either greatly abbreviated or from wholly different roots. Outside of the verbal thus formed as the central point of the sentence, there is no syntax, no inflections, no declension of nouns or adjectives.[289]

Humboldt was far from saying that the incorporativesystem was exclusively seen in American languages, any more than that of isolation in Chinese, or flexion in Aryan speech. On the contrary, he distinctly states that every language he had examined shows traces of all three plans; but the preponderance of one plan over the other is so marked and so distinctive that they afford us the best means known for the morphological classification of languages, especially as these traits arise from psychological operations widely diverse, and of no small influence on the development of the intellect.

Dr. Francis Lieber, in an essay on “The Plan of Thought in American Languages,”[290]objected to the termspolysynthesisandincorporationthat “they begin at the wrong end; for these names indicate that that which has been separated is put together, as if man began with analysis, whereas he ends with it.” He therefore proposed the nounholophrasiswith its adjectiveholophrastic, not as a substitute for the terms he criticised, but to express the meaning or purpose of these processes, which is, to convey the whole of a sentence or proposition in one word. Polysynthesis, he explains, indicates a purely etymological process, holophrasis “refers to the meaning of the word considered in a philosophical point of view.”

If we regard incorporation and polysynthesis as structural processes of language aiming to accomplish a certain theoretical form of speech, then it will be convenient to have this wordholophrasisto designate this theoreticalform, which is, in short, the expression of the whole proposition in a single word.

The eminent linguist Professor H. Steinthal, has developed the theory of incorporation more fully than any other writer. He expresses himself without reserve of the opinion that all American languages are constructed on this same plan, more or less developed.

I need not make long quotations from a work so well-known as hisCharakteristik der hauptsächlichsten Typen des Sprachbaues, one section of which, about thirty pages in length, is devoted to a searching and admirable presentation of the characteristics of the incorporative plan as shown in American languages. But I may give with brevity what he regards as the most striking features of this plan. These are especially three:—

1. The construction of words by a mixed system of derivation and new formation.

2. The objective relation is treated as a species of possession; and

3. The possessive relation is regarded as the leading and substantial one, and controls the form of expression.

The first of these corresponds to what I should callpolysynthesis; the others toincorporationin the limited sense of the term.

Some special studies on this subject have been published by M. Lucien Adam, and he claims for them that they have refuted and overturned the thesis of Duponceau, Humboldt, and Steinthal, to the effect that there is a process calledincorporativeorpolysynthetic, which can be traced in all American languages, and though not in all points confined tothem, may fairly and profitably be taken as characteristic of them, and indicative of the psychological processes which underlie them. This opinion M. Adam speaks of as a “stereotyped phrase which is absolutely false.”[291]

So rude an iconoclasm as this must attract our careful consideration. Let us ask what M. Adam understands by the termspolysynthesisandincorporation. To our surprise, we shall find that in two works published in the same year, he advances definitions by no means identical. Thus, in his “Examination of Sixteen American Languages,” he says, “Polysynthesisconsists essentially in the affixing of subordinate personal pronouns to the noun, the preposition and the verb.” In his “Study of Six Languages,” he writes: “BypolysynthesisI understand the expression in one word of the relations of cause and effect, or of subject and object.”[292]

Certainly these two definitions are not convertible, and we are almost constrained to suspect that the writer who gives them was not clear in his own mind as to the nature of the process. At any rate, they differ widely from the plan or method set forth by Humboldt and Steinthal as characteristic of American languages. M. Adam in showing thatpolysynthesis in his understanding of the term is not confined to or characteristic of American tongues, missed the point, and fell into anignoratio elenchi.

Equally narrow is his definition of incorporation. He writes, “When the object is intercalated between the subject and the verbal theme, there isincorporation.” If this is to be understood as an explanation of the German expression,Einverleibung, then it has been pared down until nothing but the stem is left.

As to Dr. Lieber’s suggestion ofholophrasticas an adjective expressing the plan of thought at the basis of polysynthesis and incorporation, M. Adam summarily dismisses it as “a pedantic succedaneum” to our linguistic vocabulary.

I cannot acknowledge that the propositions so carefully worked up by Humboldt and Steinthal have been refuted by M. Adam; I must say, indeed, that the jejune significance he attaches to the incorporative process seems to show that he did not grasp it as a structural motive in language, and a wide-reaching psychologic process.

Professor Friedrich Müller, whose studies of American languages are among the most extended and profitable of the present time, has not given to this peculiar feature the attention we might reasonably expect. Indeed, there appears in the standard treatise on the science of language which he has published, almost the same vagueness as to the nature of incorporation which I have pointed out in the writings of M. Adam. Thus, on one page he defines incorporating languages as those which “do away with the distinction between the word and the sentence;” while on another he explains incorporation as “the including of the object within the bodyof the verb.”[293]He calls it “a peculiarity of most American languages, but not of all.” That the structural process of incorporation is by no means exhausted by the reception of the object within the body of the verb, even that this is not requisite to incorporation, I shall endeavor to show.

Finally, I may close this brief review of the history of these doctrines with a reference to the fact that neither of them appears anywhere mentioned in the official “Introduction to the Study of Indian Languages,” issued by the United States Bureau of Ethnology! How the author of that work, Major J. W. Powell, Director of the Bureau, could have written a treatise on the study of American languages, and have not a word to say about these doctrines, the most salient and characteristic features of the group, is to me as inexplicable as it is extraordinary. He certainly could not have supposed that Duponceau’s theory was completely dead and laid to rest, for Steinthal, the most eminent philosophic linguist of the age, still teaches in Berlin, and teaches what I have already quoted from him about these traits. What is more, Major Powell does not even refer to this structural plan, nor include it in what he terms the “grammatic processes” which he explains.[294]This is indeed the play of “Hamlet” with the part of Hamlet omitted!

I believe that for the scientific study of language, and especially of American languages, it will be profitable to restore and clearly to differentiate the distinction betweenpolysynthesis and incorporation, dimly perceived by Duponceau and expressed by him in the words already quoted. With these may be retained the neologism of Lieber,holophrasis, and the three defined as follows:

Polysynthesisis a method of word-building, applicable either to nominals or verbals, which not only employs juxtaposition with aphæresis, syncope, apocope, etc., but also words, forms of words and significant phonetic elements which have no separate existence apart from such compounds. This latter peculiarity marks it off altogether from the processes of agglutination and collocation.

Incorporation,Einverleibung, is a structural process confined to verbals, by which the nominal or pronominal elements of the proposition are subordinated to the verbal elements, either in form or position; in the former case having no independent existence in the language in the form required by the verb, and in the latter case being included within the specific verbal signs of tense and mood. In a fully incorporative language the verbal exhausts the syntax of the grammar, all other parts of speech remaining in isolation and without structural connection.

Holophrasisdoes not refer to structural peculiarities of language, but to the psychologic impulse which lies at the root of polysynthesis and incorporation. It is the same in both instances—the effort to express the whole proposition in one word. This in turn is instigated by the stronger stimulus which the imagination receives from an idea conveyed in one word rather than in many.

A few illustrations will aid in impressing these definitions on the mind.

Aspolysyntheticelements, we have the inseparable possessive pronouns which in many languages are attached to the names of the parts of the human body and to the words for near relatives; also the so-called “generic formatives,” particles which are prefixed, suffixed, or inserted to indicate to what class or material objects belong; also the “numeral terminations” affixed to the ordinal numbers to indicate the nature of the objects counted; the negative, diminutive and amplificative particles which convey certain conceptions of a general character, and so on. These are constantly used in word-building, but are generally not words themselves, having no independent status in the language. They may be single letters, or even merely vowel-changes and consonantal substitutions; but they have well-defined significance.

Inincorporationthe object may be united to the verbal theme either as a prefix, suffix or infix; or, as in Nahuatl, etc., a pronominal representative of it may be thus attached to the verb, while the object itself is placed in isolated apposition.

The subject is usually a pronoun inseparably connected, or at least included within the tense-sign; to this the nominal subject stands in apposition. Both subjective and objective pronouns are apt to have a different form from either the independent personals or possessives, and this difference of form may be accepted asa priorievidence of the incorporative plan of structure—though there are other possible origins for it. The tense and mode signs are generally separable, and, especially in the compound tense, are seen to apply not only to the verb itself, but to the wholescope of its action, the tense sign for instance preceding the subject.

Some further observations will set these peculiarities in a yet clearer light.

Although in polysynthesis we speak of prefixes, suffixes, and juxtaposition, we are not to understand these terms as the same as in connection with the Aryan or with the agglutinative languages. In polysynthetic tongues they are not intended to form words, but sentences; not to express an idea, but a proposition. This is a fundamental logical distinction between the two classes of languages.

With certain prefixes, as those indicating possession, the form of the word itself alters, as in Mexican,amatl, book,no, mine, butnamauh, my book. In a similar manner suffixes or postpositions affect the form of the words to which they are added.

As the holophrastic method makes no provision for the syntax of the sentence outside of the expression of action (i. e., the verbal and what it embraces), nouns and adjectives are not declined. The “cases” which appear in many grammars of American languages are usually indications of space or direction, or of possession, and not case-endings in the sense of Aryan grammar.

A further consequence of the same method is the absence of true relative pronouns, of copulative conjunctions, and generally of the machinery of dependent clauses. The devices to introduce subordinate propositions I have referred to in a previous essay (above, p.346).

As the effort to speak in sentences rather than in words entails constant variation in these word-sentences, there ariseboth an enormous increase in verbal forms and a multiplication of expressions for ideas closely allied. This is the cause of the apparently endless conjugations of many such tongues, and also of the exuberance of their vocabularies in words of closely similar signification. It is an ancient error—which, however, I find repeated in the official “Introduction to the Study of Indian Languages,” issued by our Bureau of Ethnology—that the primitive condition of languages is one “where few ideas are expressed by few words.” On the contrary, languages structurally at the bottom of the scale have an enormous and useless excess of words. The savage tribes of the plains will call a color by three or four different words as it appears on different objects. The Eskimo has about twenty words for fishing, depending on the nature of the fish pursued. All this arises from the “holophrastic” plan of thought.

It will be seen from these explanations that the definition of Incorporation as given by M. Lucien Adam (quoted above) is erroneous, and that of Professor Müller is inadequate. The former reduces it to a mere matter of position or placement; the latter either does not distinguish it from polysynthesis, or limits it to only one of its several expressions.

In fact, Incorporation may take place with any one of the six possible modifications of the grammatical formula, “subject + verb + object.” It is quite indifferent to its theory which of these comes first, which last; although the most usual formula is either,

subject + object + verb, or,object + subject + verb;

subject + object + verb, or,

object + subject + verb;

the verb being understood to be the verbal theme only—not its tense and mode signs. Where either of the above arrangements occurs, we may consider it to be an indication of the incorporative tendency; but as mere position is insufficient evidence, incorporation may be present in other arrangements of the elements of the proposition.

As a fair example of polysynthesis in nouns, we may select the word for “cross” in the Cree. The Indians render it by “praying-stick” or “holy wood,” and their word for “our praying-sticks” (crosses) is:

N't'ayamihewâttikuminânak.

This is analyzed as follows:

n't', possessive pronoun, ½ person plural.

ayami, something relating to religion.

he, indicative termination of the foregoing.

w, a connective.

âttik, suffix indicating wooden or of wood.

u, a connective.

m, sign of possession.

i, a connective.

nân, termination of ⅓ person plural.

ak, termination of animate plural (the cross is spoken of as animate by a figure of speech).

Not a single one of the above elements can be employed as an independent word. They are all only the raw material to weave into and make up words.

As a characteristic specimen of incorporation we may select this Nahuatl word-sentence:

onictemacac,I have given something to somebody:

onictemacac,

I have given something to somebody:

which is analyzed as follows:

o, augment of the preterit, a tense sign.ni, pronoun, subject, 1st person.c, “semi-pronoun,” object, 3d person.te, “inanimate semi-pronoun,” object, 3d person.maca, theme of the verb, “to give.”c, suffix of the preterit, a tense sign.

o, augment of the preterit, a tense sign.

ni, pronoun, subject, 1st person.

c, “semi-pronoun,” object, 3d person.

te, “inanimate semi-pronoun,” object, 3d person.

maca, theme of the verb, “to give.”

c, suffix of the preterit, a tense sign.

Here it will be observed that between the tense-signs, which are logically the essential limitations of the action, are included both the agent and the near and remote objects of the action.

In the modifications of meaning they undergo, American verbal themes may be divided into two great classes, either as they express these modifications (1) by suffixes to an unchanging radical, or (2) by internal changes of their radical.

The last mentioned are most characteristic of synthetic tongues. In all pure dialects of the Algonkin the vowel of the verbal root undergoes a peculiar change called “flattening” when the proposition passes from the “positive” to the “suppositive” mood.[295]The same principle is strikingly illustrated in the Choctaw language, as the following example will show:[296]

takchi, to tie (active, definite).takchi, to be tying (active, distinctive).tak'chi, totie(active, emphatic).taiakchi, to tie tightly (active, intensive).tahakchi, to keep tying (active, frequentative).tahkchi, to tie at once (active, immediate).tullakchi, to be tied (passive, definite).tallakchi, to be the one tied (passive, distinctive), etc., etc.

takchi, to tie (active, definite).

takchi, to be tying (active, distinctive).

tak'chi, totie(active, emphatic).

taiakchi, to tie tightly (active, intensive).

tahakchi, to keep tying (active, frequentative).

tahkchi, to tie at once (active, immediate).

tullakchi, to be tied (passive, definite).

tallakchi, to be the one tied (passive, distinctive), etc., etc.

This example is, however, left far behind by the Qquichua of Peru, which by a series of so-called “verbal particles” affixed to the verbal theme confers an almost endless variety of modification on its verbs. Thus Anchorena in his Grammar gives the form and shades of meaning of 675 modifications of the verbmunay, to love.[297]

These verbal particles are not other words, as adverbs, etc., qualifying the meaning of the verb and merely added to it, but have no independent existence in the language. Von Tschudi, whose admirable analysis of this interesting tongue cannot be too highly praised, explains them as “verbal roots which never reached independent development, or fragments handed down from some earlier epoch of the evolution of the language.”[298]They are therefore true synthetic elements in the sense of Duponceau’s definition, and not at all examples of collocation or juxtaposition.

While the genius of American languages is such that they permit and many of them favor the formation of long compounds which express the whole of a sentence in one word, this is by no means necessary. Most of the examples of words of ten, twenty or more syllables are not genuinenative words, but novelties manufactured by the missionaries. In ordinary intercourse such compounds are not in use, and the speech is comparatively simple.

Of two of the most synthetic languages, the Algonkin and the Nahuatl, we have express testimony from experts that they can be employed in simple or compound forms, as the speaker prefers. The Abbé Lacombe observes that in Cree “sometimes one can employ very long words to express a whole phrase, although the same ideas can be easily rendered by periphrasis.”[299]In the syllabus of the lectures on the Nahuatl by Prof. Agustin de la Rosa, of the University of Guadalaxara, I note that he explains when the Nahuatl is to be employed in a synthetic, and when in an analytic form.[300]

I shall now proceed to examine those American tongues which have been authoritatively declared to be exceptions to the general rules of American grammar, as being devoid of the incorporative and polysynthetic character.

As I have said, the Othomi was the stumbling block ofMr. Duponceau, and led him to abandon his theory of polysynthesis as a characteristic of American tongues. Although in his earlier writings he expressly names it as one of the illustrations supporting his theory, later in life the information he derived from Señor Emmanuel Naxera led him to regard it as an isolating and monosyllabic language, quite on a par with the Chinese. He expressed this change of view in the frankest manner, and since that time writers have spoken of the Othomi as a marked exception in structure to the general rules of synthesis in American tongues. This continues to be the case even in the latest writings, as, for instance, in the recently publishedAnthropologie du Mexique, of Dr. Hamy.[302]

Let us examine the grounds of this opinion.

The Othomis are an ancient and extended family, who from the remotest traditional epochs occupied the central valleys and mountains of Mexico north of the Aztecs and Tezcucans. Their language, called by themselvesnhiânhiû, the fixed or current speech[303](nhiân, speech,hiû, stable, fixed), presents extraordinary phonetic difficulties on account of its nasals, gutturals and explosives.

It is one of a group of related dialects which may be arranged as follows:

It was the opinion of M. Charencey, that another member of this group was the Pirinda or Matlazinca; a position combatted by Señor Pimentel, who acknowledges some common property in words, but considers them merely borrowed.[304]

Naxera made the statement that the Mazahua is monosyllabic, an error in which his copyists have obediently followed him; but Pimentel pointedly contradicts this assertion and shows that it is a mistake, both for the Mazahua and for the Pame and its dialects.[305]

We may begin our study of the language with an examination of the

The pronouns here employed are neither the ordinary personals nor possessives (though the Othomi admits of a possessive conjugation), but are verbal pronouns, strictly analogous to those found in various other American languages. The radicals are:

In the present, the first and second are prefixed to what isreally the simple concrete form of the verb,y-nee. In the past tenses the personal signs are variously united with particles denoting past time or the past, asa, the end, to finish,maandhma, yesterday, and the prefixx, which is very noteworthy as being precisely the same in sound and use which we find in the Cakchiquel past and future tenses. It is pronouncedsh(as inshove) and precedes the whole verbal, including subject, object, and theme; while in the pluperfect, the second sign of past timehmais a suffix to the collective expression.

The future third person is given by Neve asda, but by Perez asdi, which latter is apparently from the future particlenigiven by Neve. In the second future, the distinctive particleguaprecedes the whole verbal, thus inclosing the subject with the theme in the tense-sign, strictly according to the principles of the incorporative conjugation.

This incorporative character is still more marked in the objective conjugations, or “transitions.” The object, indeed, follows the verb, but is not only incorporated with it, but in the compound tense is included within the double tense signs.

Thus, I find in Perez’s Catechism,

In this sentence,diis the personal pronoun combined with the future sign; and the verb isûn-ni, to give to another, which is compounded with the personalba, them, drops its final syllable, forming a true synthesis.

In the phrase,

both subject and object, the latter inclosed in a synthesis with the radical of the theme, the former phonetically altered and coalesced with a tense particle, are included in the double tense-sign,x-hma. This is as real an example of incorporation as can be found in any American language.

Ordinary synthesis of words, other than verbs, is by no means rare in Othomi. Simple juxtaposition, which Naxera states to be the rule, is not all universal. Such a statement by him leads us to suspect that he had only that elementary knowledge of the tongue which Neve refers to in a forcible passage in hisReglas. He writes: “A good share of the difficulty of this tongue lies in its custom of syncope; and because the tyros who make use of it do not syncopate it, their compositions are so rough and lacking in harmony to the ears of the natives that the latter count their talk as no better than that of horse-jockeys, as we would say.”[306]

The extent of this syncopation is occasionally to such a degree that only a fragment of the original word is retained. As:

The charcoal-vendor,na māthiâ.

Herenais a demonstrative particle like the Aztecin, andmāthiâis a compoundpà, to sell, andthêhñâ, charcoal.

The expression,

y mahny oqha, he loves God,

is to be analyzed,

where we perceive not only synthesis, but the object standing in apposition to the pronoun representing it which is incorporated with the verb.

So:yot-gua, light here; fromyotti, to light,nugua, here.

These examples from many given in Neve’s work seem to me to prove beyond cavil that the Othomi exhibits, when properly spoken, precisely the same theories of incorporation and polysynthesis as the other American languages, although undoubtedly its more monosyllabic character and the extreme complexity of its phonetics do not permit of a development of these peculiarities to the same degree as many.

Nor am I alone in this opinion. It has already been announced by the Count de Charencey, as the result of his comparison of this tongue with the Mazahua and Pirinda. “The Othomi,” he writes, “has all the appearance of a language which was at first incorporative, and which, worn down by attrition and linguistic decay, has at length come to simulate a language of juxtaposition.”[307]

Some other peculiarities of the language, though not directly bearing on the question, point in the same direction. A certain class of compound verbs are said by Neve to have a possessive declension. Thus, of the two wordspuengui, he draws, andhiâ, breath, is formed the verbbuehiâ, which is conjugated by using the verb in the indefinite third personand inserting the possessivesma,ni,na, my, thy, his; thus,

ybuemahia, I breathe.ybuenihia, thou breathest.ybuenahia, he breathes.[308]

ybuemahia, I breathe.

ybuenihia, thou breathest.

ybuenahia, he breathes.[308]

Literally this would be “it-is-drawing, my breath,” etc.

In the Mazahua dialects there is a remarkable change in the objective conjugations (transitions) where the whole form of the verb appears to alter. In this languageti= I;kiorkhe= thou.

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