Show LANGUAGE CLEW TO ALL PAST HISTORY why archeological work ii Is important v to some it may seem foolish for it man to spend weeks and months recording the of speech of nn an aged indian who recalls a lan ian guage abich atch will vanish completely with that persons death that lan guage Is completely outworn the descendant descendants of those bo ho used it arc are now speaking english or spanish to the uninitiated it Is the mere were record ing of us cis gibberish ret yet the american council of learned societies reports ith pride that one research worker has nearly completed records of the southern language that another Is piecing together a record of the nearly ly vanished Ilo mohican blean dialect of the eastern Algon quins and that still an other has faunl that a handful of indians in oregon still peak speak the byuse language vatch it was thought vanished CO DO stars ago such work Is more than a pastime or a hobby bobby to and others interested in america e past it Is of vital importance native lan languages pages form oae of the most reliable means of tracing movements in prehistoric america pottery weapon 00 jewelry lew elry basketry design and architecture all are clew clews to events in that forgotten past dut but language Is a thread running through them all ancient america the two con tinen ts had no fewer than languages each fundamentally different from the others in grammar vocabulary and phonetics most of them had dialecti dialects some een eien had separate form forms for the use of men and women now compi this was and how bow great an in aid it can be to the delver in prehistory pre history may be real iced by remembering that europe and asia combined have only about 25 language stocks in to tracing the movements of ancient americans scientists can make un uncannily canally accurate guesses from evi erl dence they dig from ruined villages out but there are mm many open lina occasionally casio caslo nally the student of native lan fanges can dw ibe ke those lauks belli cr er the pottery shards show it or not it onetime one time inhabitants of idaho moved to pennsylvania tho the laa ian guage will show it if the language can bo be stud studied led if the be language Inn guage of the mound builders of ohio were available for study for or instance it might marcal similarities to the lan ian guage of the mayan mayans and the aztecs to prove a relationship which many have but hart have never been able to prove tills this interest in indian languages la Is not new the spanish priests fathered gathered indian words in mexico ai as early is as 1571 bogar 11 illiams stud led 1 dan lan anges in new eng land la in the 1030 e s john ellot prepared his famous indian grammar begun in to thomas Jer jefferson lerson in 1701 1791 made an effort to rescue vanish ing indian tongues and when he sent aels and dark clark to be the pacific be he told them to study indian languages but only in recent years have scientists taken up the task in earn est as a phase of archeology archaeology arche |