Show LANGUAGE CLEW TO ALL PAST HISTORY why archeological work Is important to gome some it may seem foolish for a man to spend weeks and months recording the peculiarities of speech of an aged indian who recalls a lan ian guage which will vanish completely with that persons death that lan ian guage Is completely outworn the descendants of those who used it are now speaking english or spanish to the uninitiated it Is the mere record ing of useless gibberish yet the american council of learned societies reports with pride that one research worker has nearly completed records of the southern language that another Is piecing together a record of the near ly Tants vanished bed mohican dialect of the eastern Algon quins and that still an other has found that a handful of indians in oregon still speak the cayuse language which it was thought vanished CO 50 years ago such work is more than a pastime or a hobby to and others interested in america americas s past it Is of vital importance native languages form one of the most reliable means of tracing movements in prehistoric america pottery weal ons jewelry jewel basketry design and architecture all are clews to events in that forgotten past but language Is a thread running through them all ancient t america the two con had no fewer than lan ian grages each fundamentally different from the others in grammar lary and phonetics most of them had dialects some even had sep arate forms for the use of men and women how complex this was and how great an aid it can be to the delver in pre history may be real iced by remembering that europe and asia combined have only about 25 language stocks in tracing the movements of an dent clent americans scientists can make uncannily accurate guesses from evi dence they dig from ruined villages but there are many open links oc casio nally the student of native lan ian grages gua can close those links cheth er the pottery shards show it or not if one time inhabitants of idaho moved to pennsylvania the lan ian grages will show it it if the languages can be studied it if the language of the mound builders of ohio were available for study for instance it might reveal similarities to the lan ian guage of the mayans and the aztecs to prove a relationship which many archeologists have suspected but have never been able to prove this interest in indian languages language Is not new the spanish priests gathered indian words in mexico as early as 1571 roger williams stud led indian languages in new eng land in the 1630 s john pilot pre pared his famous indian grammar begun in thomas jefferson in 1791 mide ide an effort to rescue vanish ing indian tongues and when he sent lewis and clark to the pacific he told them to study indian languages but only in recent years have scientists acl taken up the task in earn est as a phase of archeology |