Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 1 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
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The Chayma And Tamanac Verbs Have An Enormous Complication Of
Tenses:
Two Presents, four Preterites, three Futures.
This
multiplicity characterises the rudest American languages. Astarloa
reckons, in like manner, in the grammatical system of the Biscayan,
two hundred and six forms of the verb. Those languages, the
principal tendency of which is inflexion, are to the common
observer less interesting than those which seem formed by
aggregation. In the first, the elements of which words are
composed, and which are generally reduced to a few letters, are no
longer recognisable: these elements, when isolated, exhibit no
meaning; the whole is assimilated and mingled together. The
American languages, on the contrary, are like complicated machines,
the wheels of which are exposed to view. The mechanism of their
construction is visible. We seem to be present at their formation,
and we should pronounce them to be of very recent origin, did we
not recollect that the human mind steadily follows an impulse once
given; that nations enlarge, improve, and repair the grammatical
edifice of their languages, according to a plan already determined;
finally, that there are countries, whose languages, institutions,
and arts, have remained unchanged, we might almost say stereotyped,
during the lapse of ages.
The highest degree of intellectual development has been hitherto
found among the nations of the Indian and Pelasgic branch. The
languages formed principally by aggregation seem themselves to
oppose obstacles to the improvement of the mind. They are devoid of
that rapid movement, that interior life, to which the inflexion of
the root is favourable, and which impart such charms to works of
imagination.
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