liarities
of structure. To do this properly I should require not the fag end of
one lecture, but a whole course of lectures. Yet perhaps I can say
enough now to show you how much there is in them worth studying.

Before I turn to this, however, I should like to combat a prejudice
which I fear you may entertain. It is that same ancient prejudice which
led the old Greeks to call all those who did not speak their sonorous
idioms _barbarians_; for that word meant nothing more nor less than
babblers (~Balbaloi~), people who spoke an unintelligible tongue. Modern
civilized nations hold that prejudice yet, in the sense that each
insists that its own language is the best one extant, the highest in the
scale, and that wherein others differ from it in structure they are
inferior.

So unfortunately placed is this prejudice with reference to my subject,
that in the very volume issued by our government at Washington to
encourage the study of the Indian languages, there is a long essay to
prove that English is the noblest, most perfect language in the world,
while all the native languages are, in comparison, of a very low grade
indeed!

The essayist draws his arguments chiefly from the absence of inflections
in English. Yet many of the profoundest linguists of this century have
maintained that a fully inflected language, like the Greek or Latin, is
for that very reason ahead of all others. We may suspect that when a
writer lauds his native tongue at the expense of others, he is
influenced by a prejudice in its favor and an absence of facility in the
others.

Those best acquainted with American tongues praise them most highly for
flexibility, accuracy, and resources of expression. They place some of
them above any Aryan language. But what is this to those who do not
know them? To him who cannot bend the bow of Ulysses it naturally seems
a useless and awkward weapon.

I do not ask you to accept this opinion either; but I do ask that you
rid your minds of bias, and that you do not condemn a tongue because it
differs widely from that which you speak.

American tongues do, indeed, differ very widely from those familiar to
Aryan ears. Not that they are all alike in structure. That was a hasty
generalization, dating from a time when they were less known. Yet the
great majority of them have certain characteristics in common,
sufficient to place them in a linguistic class by themselves. I shall
name and explain some of these.

As of