Chaldean language

“ Their dialect is a remnant of the later Babylonian, and resembles closely the idiom of the Palestinian Talmud, and their liturgy is a compound of fragments of the ancient Chaldean cosmogony with gnostic mysticism influenced by later superstitions. They are a quiet and inoffensive people noted, oddly enough, for the quality of their dairy produce in the villages, and for their skill as metal workers and goldsmiths in the towns where they reside. ”

“ In this way the written language continued to undergo changes until it was eventually made up of wedge-shaped symbols, one of the clear results of the use of the clay tablets.
Our principal knowledge concerning the Chaldeans pertains to their religion, which is believed to have been one of the earliest religions of the world.
The religious instinct seems to have been inborn with man. Some form and degree of worship has been found among all primitive people and is cruder or more elevated according to the stage of development. ”

“ This would doubtless be an infinite benefit, not only to the Armenians but to the Syrians and Chaldeans, and every Church of the East, among the people; a few learned men may, and most likely will, be found to extract what is valuable from the old language, if they have only enlightened judgment enough to leave the mass of rubbish behind. He mentioned the sermon on the Mount, which we received from Shushee, and said, that it opened the eyes of the children—yet even this dialect is very different from the one used here. ”

“ The two languages were used side by side, the Semitic as the common tongue, and the Accadian as a literary language. The earliest known king of Chaldea was named Eannadu (B.C. 4500) . The Chaldeans advanced slowly along the Tigris and pushed their kingdom towards Assyria in the north, where they built the cities of Ashur (Kal’at Sherkât) , Calah (Nimroud) , and Ninua (Nineveh) .
The northern portion of the Chaldeo-Assyrian empire asserted its independence about 1700 B.C., and Assyria became a separate kingdom. ”

“ It was found that these three distinct combinations of cuneiform signs represented three languages of three distinct races of men, the Persian, an Aryan people speaking an inflectional language; the Assyro-Babylonians, Semitic people who spoke a language related to the Hebrew, and the third a Turanian people who spoke an agglutinative language, allied to that of the modern Turks or Finns. ”

“ From time to time, the silence is interrupted [126] by some remark in a full, sedate voice, and intensely guttural words of Chaldee or Arabic, whether on the last debate of the council or on some new phase of the Eastern question, it is probable the visitor will never learn. But he has caught a glimpse of quiet Chaldean life. Fourteen or fifteen of the Armenian prelates, with their patriarch, live in a not very dissimilar manner. But the Armenians are much more akin to Europeans in their education and character of thought. ”

“ These foreigners were nomadic in habits, and altogether much less cultured than the Accadians. Gradually, however, they adopted the arts and literature of the people among whom they had settled; yet they retained their own language, which in the course of time superseded the less perfect Turanian speech of the original inhabitants; consequently the mixed people, known later as Chaldæans that arose from the blending of the two races, spoke a language essentially the same as that used by their northern neighbors, the Semitic Assyrians. ”

“ The Jews no longer understand Hebrew; the Christians neither Greek nor Hebrew; the Turks and Persians understand no Arabic, and even the modern Arabs themselves speak not the language of Mahomet. Is not this a very simple manner of instructing mankind, by talking to them always in a language which they do not comprehend? ”

“ The name of Chaldee has been given to the language adopted by the Jews during the Babylonian captivity. Though the Jews always retained a knowledge of their sacred language, they soon began to adopt the dialect of their conquerors, not for conversation only, but also for literary composition.283 The book of Ezra contains fragments in Chaldee, contemporaneous with the cuneiform inscriptions of Darius and Xerxes, and several of the apocryphal books, though preserved to us in Greek only, were most likely composed originally in Chaldee, [pg 277] and not in Hebrew. ”

“ The primitive Chaldeans were preeminently a literary people, and it is by their literary relics, by the scattered contents of their libraries, that we can know and judge them. As befitted the inventors of a system of writing, like the Chinese they set the highest value on education, even though examinations may have been unknown among them. ”

“ Philology does not pronounce in favour of a common origin for all barbaric culture, such as it is. The notion of a single primitive language, standing in the same relation to all existing dialects as the relation of old Aryan to Latin and English, or that of old Semitic to Hebrew and Arabic, was a notion suited only to the infancy of linguistic science. ”

“ Of these eighteen words have found five, in two different Berēber vocabularies, to the the same as in the Shellūh dialect. During our visit to the Atlas, we wrote down from the mouth of a native Shellūh, who had passed all his life there, some hundred words of that idiom. On our return home, finding that the British and Foreign Bible Society had lately acquired a translation of part of the Scriptures into one of the dialects of northern Africa, I applied to them, who most liberally showed me their vocabulary, which proved to be compiled from a manuscript in Berēber language ”

“ The Tibeto-Burman languages of the north-eastern frontier are the simple and primitive speech of semi-savage men. For such languages, contact with the Aryan languages means rapid decay and dissolution.
Hindu civilisation and Hindu religion find easy converts in the rude and simple Mongoloid people of the north-east, and acceptance of Hindu manners and customs almost always results in a rapid change of language. So again, the Iranian languages represent the final stage in the advance of Islam and its languages as a conquering religion. ”

“ The remarkable sameness of dialect which prevails among the Arabic-speaking populations of the East may be largely accounted for by the democratic spirit of Mahommedanism which holds all men equal before the supreme Khalif. ”

“ Besides, there are parleys and challenges, and at last a dialect is produced which may very properly be called a language of the camp, (Urdu-zebán, camp-language, is the proper name of Hindustání, formed in the armies of the Mogul emperors,) but where it is difficult for the philologist to arrange the living and to number the slain, unless some salient points of grammar have been preserved throughout the medley. We saw how a number of tribes may be at times suddenly gathered by the command of a Chingis-khán or Timur, like billows heaving and swelling at the call of a thunder-storm. ”

“ The whole framework of grammar—the elements of derivation, declension, and conjugation—had become settled before the separation of the Aryan family. Hence the broad outlines of grammar, in Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Gothic, and the rest, are in reality the same; and the apparent differences can be explained by phonetic corruption, which is determined by the phonetic peculiarities of each nation. On the whole, the history of all the Aryan languages is nothing but a gradual process of decay. ”

“ If, however, educated Natives resolved to apply themselves to a study so peculiarly suited to them, I consider it certain that excellent results would soon be realised. If they began to compare their vernaculars one with another, ancient forms with modern, and both with Sanskrit, they would soon find that Language had a history of its own, throwing light on all other histories, and that instead of being the driest of subjects, it was one of the richest in matters of wide human interest. ”

“ The Chehalis is spoken in three dialects, the Chehalis proper, the Quaiantl, and the Queniauitl. [III'-30]
The languages of the Salish Family, particularly that of the Chehalis, are rich in words, by means of which 619 everything coming within their knowledge may find expression; they are not easily acquired by strangers; it is difficult for the different nations and tribes to make themselves understood to one another. This is owing principally to the many localisms in vogue among them, of which there is a good specimen in the Chehalis language. ”

“ It has been said that the Babylonian language in the time of Nebuchadnezzar is found to be far nearer to Hebrew than to Chaldee. It is, in fact, very close indeed to the Hebrew. The Babylonians of that period, although they did not speak the tongue known to modern linguists as Chaldee, did certainly employ a Semitic or Aramaean dialect, and so far may be set down as Semites. And this is the ground upon which such modern philologists as still maintain the Semitic character of the primitive Chaldaeans principally rely. ”

“ Even in the earliest literary documents both the Aryan and Semitic speech appear before us as fixed and petrified. They had left forever that stage during which language grows and expands, before it is arrested in its exuberant fertility by means of religious or political concentration, by means of oral tradition, or finally by means of a written literature. In the natural history of speech, writing, or, what in early times takes the place of writing, oral tradition, is something merely accidental. ”

“ Turanian languages cannot afford such words as âge in their dictionaries. It is an indispensable requirement in a nomadic language that it should be intelligible to many, though their intercourse be but scanty. It requires tradition, society, and literature, to maintain words and forms which can no longer be analyzed at once. Such words would seldom spring up in nomadic languages, [pg 293] or if they did, they would die away with each generation.
The Aryan verb contains many forms in which the personal pronoun is no longer felt distinctly. ”

“ Now these peculiarities, in almost every case, serve to connect the peasant dialect with the old Aramaic, which Jerome tells us was the language of the natives of Palestine in the fourth century. The addition of unnecessary vowels is remarkable in the Rabbinical dialect, and, as has been shown above, the Fellahîn, in their vulgar pronunciation, preserve the most archaic sound of certain letters which were (according to Gesenius and scholars of equal authority) originally indistinguishable from others, but which in the polite pronunciation of the townsmen have now quite distinct sounds. ”

“ But still greater light was thrown on the formative and metamorphic process of language by the study of other dialects unconnected with Sanskrit or Hebrew, and exhibiting before our eyes the growth of those grammatical forms (grammatical in the widest sense of the word) which in the Aryan and Semitic families we know only as formed, not as forming; as decaying, not as living; as traditional, not as understood and intentional: I mean the Turanian languages. ”

“ We shall now see that there is scarcely any considerable race of men among whom there does not exist, in some form, the tradition of a great deluge, which destroyed all the human race, except their own progenitors.
The first of these which we shall notice, and the one with which the Hebrew agrees most closely, having been copied from it, [22:1] is the Chaldean, as given by Berosus, the Chaldean historian. [22:2] It is as follows:
"After the death of Ardates (the ninth king of the Chaldeans) , his son Xisuthrus reigned eighteen sari. ”

“ But the masterpiece of absurdity, undoubtedly, is the stipulation in regard to the Arabic language; as if by any human art a whole population, in the space of three years, could be made to substitute a foreign tongue for its own; and that, too, under circumstances of peculiar difficulty, partly arising from the total want of affinity between the Semitic and the European languages, and partly from the insulated position of the Moriscoes, who, in the cities, had separate quarters assigned to them, in the same manner as the Jews, which cut them off from intimate intercourse with the Christians. ”

“ Added to this initial difficulty, Indo-Aryan linguistics both of the classical and modern periods has formed the favourite haunt of mere amateurs who seek to compensate for their want of knowledge of the principles of historical grammar and of the modern science of language by professing utter contempt of it; and the professed student of literature who knows the language but not its history shares in this contempt. To make confusion worse confounded, the spirit of scholasticism is not yet dead ”

“ There are Aryan and Semitic languages, but it is against all rules of logic to speak, without an expressed or implied qualification, of an Aryan race, of Aryan blood, of Aryan skulls, and to attempt ethnological classification on purely linguistic grounds. These two sciences, the Science of Language and the Science of Man, cannot, at least for the present, be kept too much asunder; and many misunderstandings, many controversies, would have been avoided, if scholars had not attempted to draw conclusions from language to blood, or from blood to language. ”

“ As to the cuneiform inscriptions, the various Semitic tongues furnished means of comparison for Assyrian texts, the Persian and "Zend" for old Persic and Median, and certain cuneiform vocabularies were discovered which rendered it possible to understand a third language, the most ancient of them all, which had been utterly unknown even by name. From the time of Christ, perhaps even before it, down to sixty years ago, the languages and monuments of Egypt and Chaldæa had never been looked upon by the eye of intelligence. The mystery of ages is a mystery no more. ”