The lost Atlantis, and other ethnographic studiesWilson, Daniel, Sir
History
The lost Atlantis, and other ethnographic studies
Wilson, Daniel, Sir
America -- Antiquities; Atlantis (Legendary place); Ethnology -- America; Indians of North America -- Antiquities
Huron-Iroquois, extending of old from the St. Lawrence to North
Carolina; the Algonkin, from Hudson Bay to South Carolina; the Dakotan,
from the Mississippi to the Rocky Mountains; the Athabascan, from the
Eskimo frontier, within the Arctic circle, to New Mexico; and the Tinné
family of languages west of the Rocky Mountains, from the Youkon and
Mackenzie rivers, far south on the Pacific slope. With those, as with
the more cultured languages, or rather languages of the more cultured
races, of Central and Southern America, elaborate comparisons have been
made with vocabularies of Asiatic languages; but the results are, at
best, vague. Curious points of agreement have, indeed, been
demonstrated, inviting to further research; but as yet the evidence of
relationship mainly rests on correspondence in structure. The
agglutinative suffixes are common to the Eskimo and many American Indian
tongues. Dr. H. Rink describes the polysynthetic process in the Eskimo
language as founded on radical words, to which additional or imperfect
words, or affixes, are attached; and on the inflexion, which, for
transitive verbs, indicates subject as well as object, likewise by
addition. But, while Professor Flower unhesitatingly characterises the
Eskimo as belonging to the typical North Asiatic Mongols; he, at the
same time, speaks of them as almost as perfectly isolated in their
Arctic home “as an island population.” Nevertheless, the same structure
is common to their language and to those of the great North American
families already named. All alike present, in an exaggerated form, the
characteristic structure of the Ural-Altaic or Turanian group of Asiatic
languages.
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