Semitic languages

“ The Semitic languages come nearest to offering a worthy parallel; but they, too, fall far short of it. The earliest Hebrew documents are not greatly exceeded in antiquity by any others, and the Hebrew with its related dialects, ancient and modern, fills up a linguistic scheme of no small wealth; yet Semitic variety is, after all, but poor and scanty as compared with Indo-European; Semitic language possesses a toughness and rigidity of structure which has made its history vastly less full of instructive change ”

“ But, however this may be, certain grammatical peculiarities of the Semitic languages—above all, the predominance of triliteral roots—are so marked that it is scarcely possible to doubt whether any language with which we are tolerably well acquainted is or is not Semitic. Only when a Semitic language has been strongly influenced not only in vocabulary but also in grammar by some non-Semitic speech, as is the case with Amharic, can such a doubt be for a moment entertained. ”

“ The Aryan group of languages is much better understood than any other, for the simple reason that it has been more familiar and accessible to European science. The other groups have been less thoroughly investigated, because so far they have not been studied exhaustively by men accustomed to use them, and whose minds are set in the key of their structure. Even the Semitic languages have been approached at a disadvantage because few Jews think in Hebrew. ”

“ The Semitic Languages, in like manner, may all be traced to a common source. To this group belong the Syriac, the Hebrew, the Arabic, the Ethiopic, the ancient Phœnician, and the Carthaginian; while the cuneiform inscriptions of Bab [Pg 17] ylonia and Assyria are the written characters of a Semitic tongue common to those countries. (See Chart, p. 85.)
Philology has not followed the Semites to a home as limited as that of the Aryans; though tradition points to Armenia as their early domicile, ethnological science to Arabia or Africa. ”

“ How is the fact to be explained, he might ask, that the three great religions of the world in which the unity of the Deity forms the key-note, are of Semitic origin, and that the Aryan nations, wherever they have been brought to a worship of the One God, invoke Him with names borrowed from the Semitic languages?
But let us look more closely at the facts before we venture on theories. Mohammedanism, no doubt, is a Semitic religion, and its very core is monotheism. ”

“ If it can only be proved that the religions of the Aryan nations are united by the same bonds of a real relationship which have enabled us to treat their languages as so many varieties of the same type—and so also of the Semitic—the field thus opened is vast enough, and its careful clearing, and cultivation will occupy several generations of scholars. ”

“ In leaving the soil of Asia the language of Egypt took upon it an African dress.
Now though language can prove but little as regards race, it can prove a great deal as regards history. A mixed language means a mixed history, and indicates an intimate contact between the populations who spoke the languages which are represented in it. Egyptian grammar would not have been Semitic if those who imposed it upon the natives of the Nile had not been of Semitic descent, or at all events had not come from a region where the language was Semitic. ”

“ Two great races speaking inflected languages, the Semitic and the Indo- European, have shared between them the peopling of the historic portions of the earth; and on this account these two languages have sometimes been called political or state languages, in contrast with the appellation of the Turanian as nomadic. The term Semitic is applied to that family of languages which are native in Southwestern Asia, and which are supposed to have been spoken by the descendants of Shem, the son of Noah. They are the Hebrew, Aramaeic, Arabic, the ancient Egyptian or Coptic, the Chaldaic, and Phoenician. ”

“ The Semitic languages, like the Aryan, possessed a number of names of the Deity in common, all expressive of certain general qualities of the Deity, but all raised by one or other of the Semitic tribes to be the names of God, or of that idea which the first breath, the first sight of the world, the feeling of absolute dependence on a power beyond ourselves, had for ever impressed and implanted in the human mind. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The third and last class are the Semitic languages, as they are styled—the Hebrew and the Arabic, which, together with their kindred dialects, form the summit or apex of this pyramid. In these languages the ruling principle is that all the roots must be trisyllabic, for each of the three letters, of which the root is regularly composed, counts for a syllable, and is articulated as such. Whatever exceptions from this rule exist, must be treated as exceptions only. ”

“ In the very beginnings of recorded history we find Aryan-speaking peoples and Semitic-speaking peoples carrying on the liveliest intercourse of war and trade round and about the eastern end of the Mediterranean, but the fundamental differences of the primary{v1-154} Aryan and primary Semitic languages oblige us to believe that in early Neolithic times, before the historical period, there must for thousands of years have been an almost complete separation of the Aryan-speaking and the Semitic-speaking peoples. ”

“ In Europe the Arabic has left a deep impress on the Spanish language, and is still represented in the Maltese, which is one of its dialects.
The Semitic languages differ widely from the Indo-European in reference to their grammar, vocabulary, and idioms. On account of the great preponderance of the pictorial element in them, they may be called the metaphorical languages, while the Indo-European, from the prevailing style of their higher literature, may be called the philosophical languages. The Semitic nations also differ from the Indo-European in their national characteristics ”

“ The Semitic languages are rather a group of closely kindred dialects than a family of widely varied branches: their whole yield to linguistic science is hardly more than might be won from a single subdivision of Indo-European speech, like the Germanic or Romanic. None of the other great races into which mankind is divided cover with their dialects, to any noteworthy extent, time as well as space; for the most part, we know nothing more respecting their speech than is to be read in its present living forms. ”

“ These three branches, the Aramaic, the Hebraic, and Arabic, are so closely related to each other, that it was impossible not to recognize their common origin. Every root in these languages, as far back as we know them, must consist of three consonants, and numerous [pg 282] words are derived from these roots by a simple change of vowels, leaving the consonantal skeleton as much as possible intact. It is impossible to mistake a Semitic language; and what is most important—it is impossible to imagine an Aryan language derived from a Semitic, or a Semitic from an Aryan language. ”

“ What we mean can best be illustrated by the fact that the dictionaries of Semitic languages are mostly arranged according to their roots. When we wish to find the meaning of a word in Hebrew or Arabic we first look for its root, whether triliteral or biliteral, and then look in the dictionary for that root and its derivatives. In the Aryan languages, on the contrary, such an arrangement would be extremely inconvenient. In many words it is impossible to detect the radical element. ”

“ And in the [72] days when civilization first grew up there, there is no sign or trace of the languages we call inflectional. The speakers of Aryan dialects, whom we find in classical times in Media or Persia or North-Western India, belong to a later epoch; the old belief in the Asiatic cradle of the Aryan tongues has long since been given up by the anthropologist and comparative philologist, [67] and it is recognized that if we are to look for it anywhere it must be in Eastern Europe. The Semitic languages are equally absent ”

“ Thus in the Semitic languages there is none in either Ethiopic or Assyrian, except in the very latest period of the latter tongue; among the Aryan dialects, Russian and the other Slavonic idioms (Bulgarian excepted) have no article, the Greek article being [423] very inadequately represented by the relative pronoun ije in Old Slavonic, while Sanskrit also may be said to be without one, though the demonstrative sa sometimes takes its place, as in sa purusha like ille vir in Latin. ”

“ He had inquired about my previous education, and urged me to study philology, archaeology, and at least one Semitic language. Later he voluntarily informed me how much he, who had pursued philological, archaeological, Sanscrit, and Germanistic studies, had been impeded in his youth by having neglected the Semitic languages, which are more nearly allied to the Egyptian. ”

“ The Semitic dialects of Babylonia and Assyria differed very slightly from one another, and they are therefore called by the common name of Assyrian. We can trace the history of Assyrian by means of contemporaneous monuments for nearly 4,000 years, beginning with the records of Sargon of Accad (b.c. 3800) and ending with documents of the Parthian epoch. Assyrian belongs to the northern group of Semitic languages, being more closely related to Hebrew and Aramaic than it is to Arabic or Ethiopic. ”

“ Great as are the ingenuity and the caution which he displays, it is difficult to accept his conclusions. Several terms might be mentioned which are part of the common heritage of the northern and the southern Semites, but which can scarcely have been formed in the region of the Euphrates. Moreover, the vocabulary of most Semitic languages is but very imperfectly known, and each dialect has lost many primitive words in the course of time. ”

“ Where the dialects to be compared are few, we have to contend against one of two difficulties—either the differences between them are so slight—as in the case of the Semitic languages—that the parent-speech from which they branched off must be too recent to throw any light on its earlier history and relationships ”

“ 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. ”

“ This language has become known to us within the last twenty years, through inscriptions disinterred from the buried cities of this region. The form of speech is found to be Semitic, akin to Arabic, Syriac, Chaldee, Phœnician, and especially to Hebrew. It is written, however, unlike most Semitic tongues, from left to right. The characters are very numerous and complicated; they are of the class called “cuneiform” or “arrow-headed,” being formed out of combinations of wedges. The best account of the Assyrian alphabet will be found in the “Expédition Scientifique en Mésapotamie” of M. Oppert. ”

“ To the same cause we may attribute the fact that in religion the Sabaeans seem to resemble the northern Semites more closely than do the tribes of central Arabia; but these considerations prove nothing in favour of a nearer linguistic affinity.
One thing at least is certain, that Arabic (with Sabaean, Mahri and Socotri) and Ethiopic stand in a comparatively close Northern and Southern groups. relationship to one another, and compose a group by themselves, as contrasted with the other Semitic languages, Hebraeo-Phoenician, Aramaic and Assyrian. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Nothing short of a similarity in the roots or elements of two languages, as well as in their grammatical structure, too strong to be explained by any independent causes, is now admitted as valid proof of common descent. This limitation, however, by no means amounts to a denial of the possibility of such descent. Thus it is often argued, on the strength of some similarities between Hebrew and Indo-European roots, that the two so distinct Semitic and Aryan families of language are themselves sprung from some yet more remotely ancient tongue. ”