The Arawack Language of Guiana in its Linguistic and Ethnological RelationsBrinton, Daniel G. (Daniel Garrison)
History
The Arawack Language of Guiana in its Linguistic and Ethnological Relations
Brinton, Daniel G. (Daniel Garrison)
Arawak language
They--seeing (_addin_ to see, gerund) the--people Paulus what--had been
done (_anin_ to do, _anissia_ to have been done), loudly they called
altogether the--Lycaonia speech in, thus, The--gods (present participle
of _amallitin_ to make; the same appellation which the ancient Greeks
gave to poets, [Greek: poiêtai] makers, the Arawacks applied to the
divine powers) men like, us to now (_buté_ nota præsentis)
are--come--down from--above--down--here ourselves because--of.
AFFILIATIONS OF THE ARAWACK.
The Arawacks are essentially of South American origin and affiliations.
The earliest explorers of the mainland report them as living on the
rivers of Guiana, and having settlements even south of the Equator.[5]
De Laet in his map of Guiana locates a large tribe of “Arowaceas” three
degrees south of the line, on the right bank of the Amazon. Dr. Spix
during his travels in Brazil met with fixed villages of them near
Fonteboa, on the river Solimoes and near Tabatinga and Castro
d’Avelaes.[6] They extended westward beyond the mouth of the Orinoco,
and we even hear of them in the province of Santa Marta, in the
mountains south of Lake Maracaybo.[7]
While their language has great verbal differences from the Tupi of
Brazil and the Carib, it has also many verbal similarities with both.
“The Arawack and the Tupi,” observes Professor Von Martius, “are alike
in their syntax, in their use of the possessive and personal pronouns,
and in their frequent adverbial construction;”[8] and in a letter
written me shortly before his death, he remarks, in speaking of the
similarity of these three tongues: “Ich bin überzeugt dass diese [die
Cariben] eine Elite der Tupis waren, welche erst spät auf die Antillen
gekommen sind, wo die alte Tupi--Sprache in kaum erkennbaren Resten
übrig war, als man sie dort aufzeichnete.” I take pleasure in bringing
forward this opinion of the great naturalist, not only because it is not
expressed so clearly in any of his published writings, but because his
authority on this question is of the greatest weight, and because it
supports the view which I have elsewhere advanced of the migrations of
the Arawack and Carib tribes.[9] These “hardly recognizable remains of
the Tupi tongue,” we shall see belonged also to the ancient Arawack at
an epoch when it was less divergent than it now is from its primitive
form. While these South American affinities are obvious, no relationship
whatever, either verbal or syntactical, exists between the Arawack and
the Maya of Yucatan, or the Chahta-Mvskoki of Florida and the northern
shore of the Gulf of Mexico.
As it is thus rendered extremely probable that the Arawack is closely
connected with the great linguistic families of South America, it
becomes of prime importance to trace its extension northward, and to
determine if it is in any way affined to the tongues spoken on the West
India Islands, when these were first discovered.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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