Sometimes words appear similar when they have no shadow of relationship, the resemblance being purely accidental. Powell cites the word “tia,” meaning deer in some of the Shoshonean languages. This was at first supposed to be an attempt on the part of the Shoshones to pronounce our own word “deer,” but further investigation has shown it to be the original Shoshone name for deer, and that in some dialects it was called “tiats” and in others “tiav.” Brinton, as already mentioned, calls attention to similar resemblances between Maya and English words. A tribe would often possess two languages, one known only to the priesthood and the other the language of the people, the priest language being the older, just as to-day we find the priests of the Roman Catholic Church using a dead language in their sacred functions while the parishioners use the ordinary one. Bourke believed that the Zuñis and the Mokis each have a language of this kind,[27] and it is thought that the Central-American tribes also had. Such hieratic languages would necessarily be far older than the languages in common use, therefore if the latter tend to indicate a great antiquity for the Amerind race, we should be carried still farther back by the hieratic languages. Occasionally tribes have spoken two languages, both familiar to the common people, as in the case of the Tewas speaking Moki as well as their own language, already referred to. The Tubares of Mexico, nearly extinct, are said to have spoken two different languages among themselves, one a dialect of the Nahuatl.[28] Gatschet, the eminent student of Amerind languages, declares that “the majority suppose that an Indian language is simply a gibberish not worth bothering about, but languages that can preserve identity for centuries are certainly something more than gibberish.” He further points out that while “the Indian neglects to express with accuracy some relations which seem of permanent importance to us, as tense and sex, his language is largely superior to ours in the variety of its personal pronouns, in many forms expressing the mode of action, or the idea of property and possession, and the relations of the persons addressed to the subject of the sentence.” Again it is said by some persons, “Why study languages which have no literature, and dialects that are known only to savages?” but Max Müller insists that “dialects which never produced any literature at all, the jargons of savage tribes, the clicks of Hottentots, and the vocal modulations of the Indo-Chinese, are as important, nay, for the solution of some of our problems, more important, than the poetry of Homer or the prose of Cicero. We do not want to know languages; we want to know language, what language is, how it can form a vehicle or organ of thought; we want to know its origin, its nature, its laws.”