the old dwellers on the soil, or whether they have become blended with the native nations as in Mexico and Peru. To proceed now to the languages of the next family, the Semitic, an idea of these can be most easily gained from Hebrew. Any student seriously bent on the science of language should learn at least enough Hebrew to spell out a few chapters of Genesis, for all the other languages commonly taught in England being of the Aryan family, this will serve to bring his mind out of that groove, by familiarizing him with speech of a different material. A very moderate number of roots, mostly of three consonants, by altering their internal vowels and changing their affixes, are made to form the greater part of the language so regularly that Hebrew dictionaries are arranged throughout by the roots. Thus from the root m-l-ch are derived verb and noun forms with the sense of reigning, as mâlach he reigned, mâlchû = they reigned, yimloch he shall reign, timloch thou shalt reign, melech = king (familiar in the name of Melchizedek, "king of righteousness"), melâchim kings, malchenû = our king, malchâh = = = = queen, mamlâchâh kingdom, and so on. The principal languages belonging to the Semitic family are the Assyrian, Hebrew and Phoenician, Syrian, Arabic and Ethiopic. The Assyrian of the Nineveh inscriptions and the Arabic spoken by the desert Beduins between them best represent the original language they are all descended from. The ancient or modern peoples speaking Semitic tongues belong mainly to the dark-white race, the type in which they agree being now most plainly seen in the Jewish countenance, with its aquiline nose, full lips, and curly black hair. Yet by features alone it would not have been possible to distinguish the Jews, Assyrians, and Arabs, among the mass of darkwhite nations. Here is seen the value of language, which comes in to show that a certain group of nations are connected by common ancestry from an ancient people, who spoke the lost tongue whence Arabic and Hebrew are offshoots, and who in the ages when history begins were dwelling in South-West Asia, and sending forth their migrating tribes to found new nations, whose acts in the world form one of the great chapters of history. The conquering Assyrians took up and carried on the older Chaldæan civilisation. The Phoenicians became the great merchants of the old world, with trading colonies along the Mediterranean and commerce in the far East, nor was it only stuffs and spices that they carried, but they spread arts and thoughts into new regions, and in their hands the clumsy hieroglyphic writing became the alphabet. The Israelites, though as a nation they never reached such power or culture, made their conquests in the world of religion, and while the crowd of deities worshipped in Assyrian and Phoenician temples vanished away, the worship of Jehovah passed on into Christianity, and overspread the "world. Latest, the warrior-tribes of Arabia carried the banner of their prophet among the nations around, and founded the faith of Islam, a civilizing power in the middle ages, and even in these days of its decay an influence across the world from Western Africa to the islands of the far East. The language of the ancient Egyptians, though it cannot be classed in the Semitic family with Hebrew, has important points of correspondence, whether due to the long intercourse between the two races in Egypt, or to some deeper ancestral connection; and such analogies also appear in the Berber languages of North Africa. These difficult questions can merely be mentioned here. Attempts have been made, though with little result, to prove the Aryan and Semitic languages themselves to be descended from a single parent tongue. If it is so, then ages of change have so wiped away the traces of common origin that philological comparison fails to substantiate them. While speaking of the Aryan and Semitic families of language, it should be noticed that many philologists connect them as belonging to one class, as being "inflecting" languages, or such as can blend their roots and affixes, and alter the roots themselves internally so that, as the beginner in Greek grammar well knows, it is often no easy matter to see where the root ends and the termination begins. The inflecting families have certainly a power of compact word-formation which has done much to give expressiveness and accuracy to such poetical and philosophical languages as Greek and Arabic. But the distinction is by no means clear between the structure of such inflecting languages and the agglutinating languages of other nations, as the Tatars. Could the Aryan and Semitic families be both traced back to the same family, this would not prove the whole white race to have had one original language, for the Georgian of the Caucasus, the Basque of the Pyrenees, and several more would still lie outside, apparently unconnected with either of the great families, or with one another. In the middle and north of Asia, on the steppes or among the swamps and forests of the bleak north, wandering hordes of hunters or herdsmen show the squat-built brownyellow Tatar or Mongolian type, and speak languages of one family, such as Manchu and Mongol. Although principally belonging to Asia, these Tatar or Turanian languages have established themselves in Europe. At a remote period, rude Tatar tribes had spread over northern Europe, but they were followed up and encroached on by the invading Aryans, till now only much-mixed outlying remnants of them, Esths, Finns, Lapps, are found speaking Tatar languages. In later ages, history records how armies of Tatar race, Huns and Turks, poured into Europe in their turn, subduing the Aryan peoples, so that now the Hungarian and Turkish languages remain records of these last waves of invasion from Central Asia. The Tatar hordes are first heard of in history as barbarians, as many tribes are still, but their chief nations becoming Buddhists, Mohammedans, or Christians, have adopted the civilisation belonging to these religions. The Tatar languages are of the kind called agglutinative, forming words by putting first the root, which carries the sense and is followed by suffixes strung on to modify it. Thus in Turkish the root sev, to love, makes sevishdirilmediler, they were not to be brought to love one another. In some languages of this class, a remarkable law of vowel-harmony compels the suffix to conform its vowel to that of the root it is attached to, as if to make clear to the hearer that it belongs to it; thus in Hungarian ház = house, forms házam = my house, but szék = chair, forms székem = my chair. The dense population of South-East Asia, comprising the Burmese, the Siamese, and especially the Chinese, shows a type of complexion and feature plainly related to the Tatar or Mongolian, but the general character of their language is different. The Chinese language is made up of monosyllables, each a word with its own real or grammatical sense, so that our infant-school books in one syllable give some notion of Chinese sentences. Other neighbouring languages share this habit of using monosyllables, and as this limits them to an inconveniently small number of words, they have taken to the expedient of making the musical pitch or intonation alter the meaning, as in Siamese, where the syllable ha, according to the notes it is intoned on, means a pestilence, or the number five, or the verb to seek. Thus the intoning which in England serves to express emotion or distinguish question from answer is turned to account in the far East for making actually different words, an example how language catches at any available device when a means of expression is wanted. Looking on the map of Asia at this south-east group of nations, it is plainly not by accident that the people of such neighbouring districts should have come to talk in words of one syllable, but the habit seems to have come from a common ancestral source, and gives the whole set of languages a family character. These monosyllable languages are often used to illustrate what the simple childlike constructions of man's primitive speech may have been like. But it is well to mention that Chinese or Siamese, simple as they are, must not be relied on as primitive languages. The childlike Chinese phrases may be not primitive at all, but may come of the falling away of older complicated grammar, much as our own English tends to cut short the long words and drop the inflexions used by our ancestors. Chinese simplicity of grammar by no means goes with simplicity of thought and life. The Chinese nation, like the Egyptian and the Babylonian, had been raised to a highly artificial civilisation in ages before the Phoenicians and Greeks came out of barbarism. It is not yet clear to what race the old Babylonians belonged who spoke the Akkadian tongue, but this shows analogies which may connect it with the Tatar or Mongolian languages. It has been already seen (p. 102) how the Malays, Micronesians, Polynesians, and Malagasy, a varied and mixed population of partly Mongoloid race, are united over their immense ocean-district half round the globe by languages of one family, the Malayo-Polynesian. The parent language of this family may have belonged to Asia, for in the Malay region the grammar is more complex, and words are found |