April 1930
183
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of mastering Cakchiquel is not as impossible as it would seem from the figures I have given above. Were it only possible for us thoroughly to master the Indian psychol ogy behind the language, it would not become very hard to learn the root words of its vocabulary and the rules governing their inflection so as to understand with ease everything that is said and to use the great multiplicity of forms accurately. I cannot say that it would be easy to master the pronunciation. There are several sounds which are extremely hard for anyone but an Indian to make. I have never seen a non-Indian who could pro nounce them perfectly even though he had learned to speak considerable Cakchiquel from childhood. It seems to be nearly a physical impossibility to master fully some of the guttural’sounds. Dr. J. Craig Potter, of Rochester, New York, who visited our field and examined many pa tients, found that invariably the Indian’s uvula is very long. It is my belief that that is necessary for the proper pronunciation of Cakchiquel. Apart from the verbs, Cakchiquel is not highly in flected. Some nouns showing relationship, such as “son” and “daughter,” inherently show the gender of parent or the person to whom the relationship is connected, but there is no such thing as inflection of nouns or adjectives to show gender. Some nouns are inflected at the end to show plurality. When a possessor is in view the noun is inflected by the addition of prefixes denoting the number and person of the possessor. We are often asked if Cakchiquel is similar to Span ish. It is as different from it as Chinese is from English. Of course a few vitiated Spanish words have found their way into the Cakchiquel vocabulary. (In some towns the Indians mix the two languages in their speech.) But, con sidering the fact that the two races have lived side by side for four centuries, these words are very few. Cakchiquel is a Mayanese language, as are most of the Indian lan guages of Guatemala. It is quite unlike the Aztec lan guage of Mexico but has many things in common with the Mayanese languages spoken in .southern Mexico (Chiapas and Yucatan). We have been greatly interested to note that similarities also exist between Cakchiquel and the lan guage spoken by the natives of the Island of Guam, and also to find over thirty words which are the same or similar to words in Hebrew. God alone knows the origin of the Indians of the Americas. Some people note marked similarities between Indian architecture as found in the ruins of ancient cities
in Mexico and Central America, and the architecture of ancient Egypt, and believe that a connection exists be tween the two peoples. Some scientists say that this is due to the existence at one time of a continent called Atlantis between Africa and America, forming an easy route for the Egyptians to colonize westward: Bible teachers, how ever, point to Gen. 10:25 as the solution. The latter is more probable in my mind, for if you will notice the map of Africa and that of South America you will observe that the two continents would fit together very nicely. It should also be borne in mind, however, that an authority on North American Indian languages has found 1,500 In dian words which show a relationship to the languages spoken by peoples who inhabited China previously to the Chinese people. Other facts also point to a relationship between the American Indians and the peoples of Asia. One truth stands out clearly above all the theories, and that is the inspired statement of Acts 17:26. Cakchiquel is clearly one of the great world family of languages, and although we cannot locate it exactly on the family tree we must note its elaborate structure, far surpassing that of modern European tongues, and also its unusual purity from infusion of foreign elements. And as we rightfully give it a place back near the beginning of human lan guages, we must admit that, far from being an evolution of a cruder mode of expression, it is rather a product of great mentality and has been preserved till today less tam pered with by diverging influences than its distant cousins with which we are more familiar. In this connection I would like to mention a few other facts which connect the Indians and Bible revelation. First of all, it should be noted that the Indians have traditions of the Deluge. Our Cakchiquels tell of how the waters covered the earth, and while their forefathers escaped they know not how, the rest of humanity perished except for some people who crawled into caves and closed up the openings so that the water could not get in to drown them, and others who climbed high trees on top of the mountains where the water did not reach them. How ever, they were forced to endure a long fast, the result of which was that the people in caves turned into gophers and those in the tree tops turned into monkeys. Our Indians also realize the existence of good and evil influences. They attribute the good to the sun and to the forces of nature, and the bad to evil spirits who inhabit the
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