Hamitic languages

“ It must be admitted that there is also much disagreement—for instance, the widest divergence in the mass of the vocabulary; and this applies to the Semitic languages as compared not only with those Hamitic languages that are gradually becoming known to us at the present day, but with the Egyptian, of which we possess documents dating from the fourth and perhaps fifth millennium before the Christian era. ”

“ No one can deny that it is also of scientific value. Its applicability has been specially proved with the African languages, and in this department it has been most successfully employed in a great number of grammatical and lexicographical works, as well as biblical translations and the reproduction of narrations, legends, and proverbs in the various idioms. Of the Hamitic branch of the African languages, which is distinguished by grammatical genders, there are seven side-branches, from the ancient Egyptian to the Haūsa- and Nama- (Namaqua-) lan{105}guages, which have been thus examined. ”

“ What and where are the major divisions of the human animal, biologically considered (e.g., Congo Negro, Egyptian White; Australian Black, Polynesian) ? What are the most inclusive linguistic groupings, the “linguistic stocks,” and what is the distribution of each (e.g., the Hamitic languages of northern Africa, the Bantu languages of the south; the Malayo-Polynesian languages of Indonesia, Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia) ? How do the peoples of the given area divide themselves as cultural beings? ”

“ The bulk of the Semitic and Hamitic-speaking peoples are put by ethnologists with the Aryans among the Caucasian group of races. They are “white.” The Semitic and Nordic “races” have a much more distinctive physiognomy; they seem, like their characteristic languages, to be more marked and specialized than the Hamitic-speaking peoples.
§ 5
Across to the north-east of the Aryan and Semitic areas there must once have spread a further distinct language system which is now represented by a group of languages known as the Turanian, or Ural-altaic group. ”

“ There was probably also more or less of an eastern dispersal, but we cannot consider the problem of these Oriental Caucasic remnants and traces. The great body went westward. The Hamitic peoples distributed themselves along the southern shore of the Mediterranean, and many may well have occupied a large part of the Sahara region, then a land of watercourses capable of supporting a large population. Behind them came the Semitic folk. Judging from their languages the Hamitic and Semitic peoples seem to have been in contact over a wide area, and for a long space of time. ”

“ Apart from the dialects already mentioned, as belonging to the Hamitic or the Semitic family, the best established and most widely extended group of African languages is that one which fills nearly the whole southern part of the continent, from a few degrees north of the equator to the Cape of Good Hope. ”

“ Berber belongs to a class of languages named Hamitic, which comprises ancient Egyptian, Coptic, and Ethiopian languages. An obvious peculiarity which strikes an Englishman, is the prevalence of Th sounds, both hard and soft, as in the English words ‘the’ and ‘thin.’ T is often softened into Th, and S into Z. But natives of the same village do not always pronounce words alike. For instance, one would say Aït Ménguellat, another the Aïth Ménguellath. ”

“ This Libyan race is distinctively a white race, with dark curly hair; the Eastern Hamites are equally distinctively a brown people with frizzy hair. If, as Sergi believes, these brown people are themselves a race, and not a cross between white and black in varying proportions, they are found in their greatest purity among the Somali and Galla, and mixed with Bantu blood among the Ba-Hima (Wahuma) and Watussi. The Masai seem to be as much Nilotic Negro as Hamite. ”

“ Frequent attempts to detach Egyptian from Hamitic and to attribute it to a Semitic immigration later than that of the other Hamites cannot be proved. Egyptian is, in many respects, more remote from Semitic than the Libyan-Cushitic division, being more agglutinative than the better types of its sister branch, having lost the most characteristic verbal flection (the Hamito-Semitic imperfect) , forming the nominal plural in its own peculiar fashion, &c. ”

“ The theory of “borrowing” seems totally inadequate to explain those fundamental features of structure, hidden away in the very core of the linguistic complex, that have been pointed out as common, say, to Semitic and Hamitic, to the various Soudanese languages, to Malayo-Polynesian and Mon-Khmer [174] and Munda, [175] to Athabaskan and Tlingit and Haida. We must not allow ourselves to be frightened away by the timidity of the specialists, who are often notably lacking in the sense of what I have called “contrastive perspective.” ”

“ The language in general is rich in the means of formal distinction. Those dialects which border on the Hottentots have, apparently by derivation from the latter, the clicks or clucking-sounds which form a conspicuous part of the Hottentot spoken alphabet.
12. Central African Languages.—The remaining languages of Africa form a broad band across the centre of the continent, between the Bantu on the south and the Hamitic on the east and north. ”

“ The connexion between the Semitic languages and the Hamitic appears to indicate that the primitive seat of the Semites is to be Original seat of Semites. sought in Africa; for it can scarcely be supposed that the Hamites, amongst whom there are gradual transitions from an almost purely European type to that of the Negroes, are the children of any other land than “the dark continent.” There seems, moreover, to be a considerable physical resemblance between the Hamites and the Semites, especially in the case of the southern Arabs ”

“ It may be said that these differences are due to minglings with other races, which to a certain extent is doubtless true; but the striking and significant fact remains that the complexion varies throughout very closely in accordance with the climate. The physical differences among the widely-scattered tribes of the Malayo-Polynesian family, from Madagascar to Hawaii, are far more strongly marked than the differences in their dialects. In Africa, the tribes of the Hamitic family, speaking allied languages, vary notably with the climate. ”

“ Nobody now looks forward to anything so unlikely, or so undesirable, as the abandonment of all the languages in the world except one. What is considered practicable is the selection of one language as the recognized international medium, and the teaching of that language everywhere in addition to the mother tongue, so that no two educated men could ever meet without possessing the means of communication. To a certain degree we have this already in French, but French is not known so generally, or so perfectly, as to make it answer the purpose. ”

“ Until you can really feel the refinements of a language, your mental culture can get little help or furtherance from it of any kind, nothing but an interminable series of misunderstandings. I think that in the education of our boys too many languages are attempted, and that their minds would profit more by the perfect acquisition of a single language in addition to the native tongue. ”

“ I used to count him as a remarkable and almost solitary instance of a man speaking two languages in their perfection, but I learned since then that his French had displaced his Italian, and so completely that he was quite unable to speak Italian correctly, and made use of French invariably when in Italy. The risk of this displacement is always greatest in cases where the native tongue is not kept up by means of literature. ”

“ It must then be allowed, that the Indo-European and Semitic families are in their grammatical system (which affords the truest, if not the only test of affinity) radically distinct, and can in no way be derived from each other. The motto of the old school, that “all languages are dialects of a single one,” must be abandoned for ever.
But even if it could be shown that there is an affinity between Hebrew and Sanskrit, a far more difficult task would remain for those who endeavour to prove from philology the original unity of the human race ”

“ 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. ”

“ He argues, however, that this is exactly what we should have expected, à priori, in the case of Nomadic languages spoken over an area so vast; languages which have never been the instruments of political organisation, which have no history in the past and no destiny in the future, and which never had any literature to give fixity to their acknowledged unsettledness. ”

“ In the use of languages I have one faculty which seems to be rather uncommon: that of keeping them entirely separated. When speaking or writing French I am, for the time being, like one totally ignorant of English, as English words do not occur to me, and I never translate anything, not even weights and measures, or money, or the thermometer, from one language to the other, but think in each, independently.”
When Hamerton here says that this ability is unusual, he no doubt means that it is unusual in so high a degree as he had it. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The multiplicity of languages is due to the policy of international hate, inaugurated by the nations of Europe to promote the selfish purposes of rulers. Barbarism is diversity; civilization is unity. The human race is one, provided it is civilized, and it should have but one language. Language is a tool, and time consumed in acquiring skill in the use of more than one tool designed for the same end, is wasted. The standing armies of Europe obstruct the way to unity of language. The time will come when all civilized peoples will speak one tongue, probably the English. ”

“ Still there are illusions, and the commonest of them is that a modern language may be very easily mastered. There is a popular idea that French is easy, that Italian is easy, that German is more difficult, yet by no means insuperably difficult. It is believed that when an Englishman has spent all the best years of his youth in attempting to learn Latin and Greek, he may acquire one or two modern languages with little effort during a brief residence on the Continent. ”

“ With the exception of the Chinese, the peoples of Indo-China, and the Thibetans, who speak monosyllabic languages, and also the Indo-Europeans and the Semito-Hamites, who use inflectional languages, all the rest of mankind belongs, by its mode of speech, to the division of agglutinative language. ”

“ It is the most palpable exponent of commonality that defines us as a people. However, it is primarily a spoken language, not a widely written one. I see the web changing this situation more so than any traditional means of language dissemination. In Windows on Haiti, the primary language of the site is English, but one will equally find a center of lively discussion conducted in "Kreyòl". In addition, one will find documents related to Haiti in French, in the old colonial creole, and I am open to publishing others in Spanish and other languages. ”

“ To say that a man’s accent betrays his nationality is another way of stating that every language has a home of its own upon the surface of the earth. A word or an accent will thrive or wither like a tree according to region. In the earliest forms of Aryan languages, words for fish or sea appear to be wanting—a want which points to inland origins. The natives of the scorching equatorial lowlands have no word for ice in their dialects. A further glimpse into the past is required for a proper estimate of these facts. Man’s conquest of a region is achieved in two distinct stages. ”

“ History, too, particularly the most ancient history, has received new light and life from a comparative study of languages. Nations and languages were in ancient times almost synonymous, and what constitutes the ideal unity of a nation lies far more in the intellectual factors, in religion and language, than in common descent and common blood. But for that very reason we must here be most cautious. It is but too easily forgotten that if we speak of Aryan and Semitic families, the ground of classification is language, and language only. ”

“ The Celtic, Teutonic, and Slavonic races come before us as groups of mankind marked out by the test of language. Within those races separate nations are again marked out by a stricter application of the test of language. Within the race we may have languages which are clearly akin to each other, but which need not be mutually intelligible. Within the nation we have only dialects which are mutually intelligible, or which, at all events, gather round some one central dialect which is intelligible to all. ”