The Wichita Daily Eagle

OLDEST LANGUAGE IN THE WORLD.

The Mexican government's invitation to the International Congress of Americans to hold their session of October next in the City of Mexico is particularly well timed, in view of the ethnological aspect of the proposed meeting. Dr. Le Plongeon, the archaeologist, has made a decidedly sensational claim for the Quiches dialect, the tongue spoken by the wild Quiches Indians of Guatemala, to the effect that it is an older language than the Sanskrit, and probably the oldest living speech. The Quiches are descendants of the Mayas whose hieroglyphic inscriptions on the walls of the Yucatan temples Dr. Le Plongeon now believes he may yet be able to decipher by means of the phonetic values of the Quiches tongue. He thinks, too, that he has discovered the hieratic alphabet of the Mayas to be almost identical with that of the ancient Egyptians. The doctor's claims give rise to many interesting conjectures. The oldest language in the world is of course, still a mystery. The long accepted speech of the Hebrew as the parent speech is still held by those orthodox church-goers who cling to the Tower of Babel episode: but since Coleridge's day the development of Sanskrit study, begun with Sir William Jones' observation on the language of the Sakuntala, has given Sanskrit a slight precedence of Hebrew. Professor Max Mueller claims for a certain Hindoo work the honor of being the oldest book in the world—older even than Egypt's famous Book of the Dead. While Sanskrit has proved itself to be the parental Indo-European speech, the relative position of the Aryan and Semitic groups has not yet been defined; and the parentage of the Egyptian (if not from the ancient Hittites of the Phoenician coasts) is still utterly unknown. That the early Egyptians may have crossed to America and Central America in prehistoric times is not altogether implausible. Such was the old geological link and the first European route of discovery. This view has already been adopted by Ignatius Donnelly in his clever but scarcely scientific work upon Plato's myth of the lost island of "Atlantis." Mr. Donnelly advanced, too, as far as the then meagre Mayas linguistic permitted, an argument based upon a philological claim akin to the present claim made by Dr. Le Plongeon. Modern philologists have worked away, however, from the western to the eastern hypothesis, and are inclined today to assign the Mayas to an Asiatic parentage. The interpretations of the Aztec calendar-stone and other Central American antiquities would seem to confirm this belief. Nevertheless, Dr. Le Plongeon, by virtue of his genuine scholarship and his long and persevering work in the archaeological field, deserves a serious and attentive audience.