The Tupian stock was widely extended at the time of the discovery along the Atlantic Coast region from La Plata to the Amazon, with branches scattered along the Paraguay and the Madeira to the foot of the Andes. Their primitive home, Brinton, with reason, assumes to have been in the central highland country to the east of Bolivia. The general direction of the earliest migrations of this stock was there fore southward (down the Paraguay to the Atlantic), after which the Tupi branch followed the coast to the Amazon. The Tapuyan stock, who once occupied the region between the Nine' and the Atlantic Coast (from the latter they have been driven by the Tupis), are prob ably the oldest human residents of part of this area, their tenure of the seacoast reaching far back into prehistoric times.
The Chibchan stock, to which was due the civilization of the Bogota region of Colombia, had their original habitat in the Andean high lands of central or southern Colombia, whence they wandered northwest into the Isthmus of Panama and northeastward up the Magdalena.
The Quechuan stock, authors of the most remarkable of South American civilizations, according to their own traditions spread from very small beginnings in the country about Lake Titicaca; but von Tschudi and Brinton, for linguistic reasons chiefly, find the primi tive home of this people to have been in the extreme northwest of their characteristic area. The Aymara stock, which some authorities consider to have been a branch of, or perhaps an old member of the Quechuan, had its original habitat to the southeast of the latter. The relation of the Aymaran stock to that which produced the Calchaqui civilization of the northern Argentine is not clear.
Language and the lan guages of the American aborigines, con stitute so many independent families of speech, the vocabularies of which are entirely divergent one from another, nearly all (if not all) of them possess certain general grammatical characteristics which justify us in classing them together as one great group of human tongues. Brinton enumerates as points of resemblance: Development of pronominal forms, fondness for generic particles and for verbs over nouns, and incorporation — the in clusion of subject or object (or both) in the verb, etc. Most American Indian tongues may be called aholophrastic," from the practice of compressing a whole "sentence* into a aword,* the length of which is sometimes very remark able. A.s an example may be cited the Micmac (Algonkian) yaleoolettatktowepoktvose, "I am walking about carrying a beautiful black um brella over my head.' This word, according to Rand, is derived from poksallson, "an um brella"; miiktaude, "I am black"; wollle, 'I am beautiful*; yelled, 'I walk about.* From the Kootenay language may be cited: AriltItllimkirtZ, 'he carries the head in his hand* (is, verbal particle • ail, "to carry"; dam, composition form of ttaktillm, "head"; kin, "to do anything with the hand"; verbal) ; hintilpqandpits?, "thou seest me" (kin, 'thou,' subject pronoun; apqcs, "to see" ; ap, "me,' objective pronoun; ins, ver bal). As typical incorporative languages the Iroquoian and Eskimo may serve. All the in corporative forins of speech in America do not, however, proceed upon identical lines; and some that do incorporate, like Kootenay and Es kimo, often have one or more cases. According
to Dixon and Kroeber many Californian lan guages do not possess the feature of incorpora tion at all (such are, for example, Maidu, Pomo, Yuki, etc.). As types of incorporating lan guages less complete than Iroquoian we have Kootenay, Siouan, Aztecan. Some of the Central and South American tongues seem also to have little incorporation. Otomi and Maya appear to be evolving in somewhat the same direction as modern English, away from in corporation and grammatical plethora. Many of the Amerindian tongues are both prefix and suffix others prefer prefixes, others, again, suffixes. Some possess, and some do not, a plural form for nouns; a dual; gender-dis tinction in pronouns; a high development of demonstratives; reduplication; syntactical cases, etc. A few possess grammatical gender and some exhibit differences in the words used by men and women. In the matter of phonetics the languages of the American aborigines are remarkably divergent, some being extremely harsh, guttural and consonantic, others equally smooth, soft and vocalic. The absence of cer tain consonant sounds and the equivalence of certain vowels and consonants characterize some forms of American speech. Euphonic changes are of major or minor importance. Sentence-construction differs greatly in various tongues. The position of the adjective is not always the same. The Haida language has even a distinction like that between our shall and will Careful investigation of the many Indian lan guages, as yet studied imperfectly, if at all, may reveal other interesting linguistic phenomena. How much has been written about and in some of the languages of primitive America may be seen from the bibliographies of Pilling! Our knowledge of them varies from a brief vocabu lary of the Esselenian to the exhaustive dic tionary of Yahgan compiled by Bridges. The native literature runs from the unrecorded tales of the northernmost Athapascans to the poetry of the ancient Mexicans and Peruvians, some of which has been handed down from pre Columbian times. The only actually phonetic (syllabic) alphabet now in use among the In dians (except the syllabaries introduced by missionaries among the Athapascans, Crees, etc.) is post-Columbian— the invention of a half-blood Cherokee. A sort of alphabet has, however, sprung up more recently among the Winnebagos. The development of picture writing varied very much among the numerous tribes, as may be seen from Mallery's classic study of the subject. Sometimes, as is the case with the Kootenays, ability to draw does not seem to have been accompanied by exuber ant pictography. The Walum Olum of the Delawares, the of the Kiowa, Sioux, Pima, etc., are special developments of primi tive records, the highest form of which is seen in the manuscripts ("books") of the Aztecs and Mayas of a religio-historical character. The pictographic records of the Ojibwa "medicine men" have been studied by Hoffman, and the rite-literature of the Cherokee by James Mooney. The native literature of primitive America has been the subject of special mono graphs by Dr. D. G. Brinton. The Spanish American countries have furnished several writers and investigators of Indian descent.