CRAMMING SENTENCES INTO ONE WORD

Evening Post, Volume CXX, Issue 48, 24 August 1935, Page 25

CRAMMING SENTENCES INTO ONE WORD

THE man who originated the saying, "It's1 Greek to me," to denote the height of unintelligibility, had not heard of ' Cakchiquel, says the "New York Times." It is a language with 100,000 verb forms and no literature and it is spoken by a tribe of about 200,000 Indians in Guatemala. . Single words in the tongue are the equivalent of whole sentences : in English. W. Cameron TWnsend,' a missionary-who. with Mrs. Townsend, only recently gave the Cakcliiquels their first book, the New Testament, lokl something of the ramifications of the language recently. . , "The language of the Cakcliiquels is remarkable in that most of its verbs may be conjugated in 100,000 different'forms," lib explained. The prefixes-answer four questions which arise in the Indian's mind about the verb—when, who, where, and whose. The suffixes and additions tell the rest of the story of the meaning so that one word frequently embodies a whole sentence. _Mr. Townsend, for 'example, cited the Cakchiquel word "xojorutzu,", which he'translated as "he came and looked at us." The root of the word is "izu,", he explained. The "x" indicates past lime, the "oj" (literally "we are") reveals the number and person of the object, and the "o," a vestigial form of the verb "oka," meaning "to arrive," shows that the subject came from elsewhere expressly to perform the act of the verb. The "ru" simply indicates that the possessor of the act or the subject was in the third person singular. If the act of looking were sustained'until it became a stare, .the" root ""tzu" .would ;be repeated so that, "xoj orutzutzu" would mean "he came and stared at us."