Professor Whitney says, in reference to American languages generally, what may more especially be applied to the Huron-Iroquois: “There are infinite possibilities of expressiveness in such a structure; and it would only need that some native American Greek race should arise, to fill it full of thought and fancy, and put it to the uses of a noble literature, and it would be rightly admired as rich and flexible, perhaps beyond anything else that the world knew.”[144] Yet, on the other hand, the Iroquois dispense with the whole labials, never articulate with their lips, and throw entirely aside from their alphabetical series of phonetics six of those most constantly in use by us.
In this direction, then, lies an ethnological problem which cannot fail to awaken ever-increasing interest. To the native languages of the New World we must look for a true key to the solution of some of the most curious and difficult questions involved in the peopling of the continent. “There lies before us,” says Professor Whitney, “a vast and complicated problem in the American races; and it is their language that must do by far the greatest part of the work in solving it.”
Of the languages of the Huron-Iroquois, the Huron appears to be the oldest, if not the parent stock. When this aggressive race had spread, as conquerors, far to the south of the St. Lawrence, the mother nation appears to have held on to the cradleland of the race, where its representatives were found still in possession when the first European explorers entered the St. Lawrence. Colonists, of French or English origin, have been in more or less intimate intercourse with them ever since, yet the materials for any satisfactory study of the Huron language, or of a comparison between it and the various Iroquois dialects, are still scanty and very inadequate. The languages of the Five Nations that originally constituted the members of the Iroquois league, are, in the strictest sense of the term, dialects. In their council-house on the Grand river, the chiefs of the Mohawks, Oneidas, Onandagas, Cayugas, and Senecas, speak each in their own language and need no interpreter. Nevertheless, the differences are considerable; and a Seneca would scarcely find the language of a Mohawk intelligible to him in ordinary conversation. But the separation of the Tuscaroras from the Iroquois on the Mohawk river had been of long duration, and their language differs much more widely from the others.