of Tur. But the countries reclaimed by Shem and Japhet mark the high road of civilisation, and comprehend the stage on which the drama of ancient and modern history has been acted. Shem was in advance of Japhet; and his first colonies represent a stage of language not yet decidedly Semitic, not yet freed from all Turanian influences, and, hence, less distant also from the stream of Arian speech. These were the colonists of Africa, who have fallen back into nomadic habits, but whose language is still the language of the people in Marocco, Algiers, Tunis, Tripoli, and Fez, wherever it has not been supplanted by the tongue of the conquering Arabs. A second colony, not yet decidedly Semitic, but, owing to political influences, more settled in its grammatical system, took its abode in Egypt. A third made its idiom the language of Babylonia and Assyria. These three early colonies exhibit the Semitic in its struggle towards grammatical form and consistency; and the individuality of Shem has not yet in them obscured those traces of a common past which enable us to connect the radical elements of the Semitic with the Turanian, and through it with the Arian family. After these three colonies, the limits of the Semitic speech were drawn more closely together, and the three later branches, the Arabic, Aramaic, and Hebrew, stand before us as cognate descendants of one parent, who has left to each the sharp and decided features of his own expression. The Arian family has had but one generation of dialects. There was a time when the ancestors of this race formed one family, in the proper sense of the word. Their language was then the idiom of a hamlet, as Latin was at one time spoken by the few adventurers who built their cottages on the hills of the Tiber. Without some such previous concentration, as it is impossible to account for the perpetuation of the most minute and fanciful forms in the Roman dialects of modern Europe, it would be in vain to account for the coincidences between the Arian dialects of the ancient world. The Arian language, which grew, or became nationalised, into Sanscrit, Persian, Greek, Latin, Teutonic, Slavonic, and Celtic, must have been a language richer perhaps than any of its descendants, but a language with such settled principles, and such intense individuality in grammar and dictionary, that the national, or, as we may here call it, the individual character of its descendants, though widely different as the meditative Hindu and active Greek, could never obliterate or efface the stamp of their common parent. And if now we gaze from our native shores over that vast ocean of human speech, with its waves rolling on from continent to continent, rising under the fresh breezes of the morning of history, and slowly heaving in our own more sultry atmosphere, - with sails gliding over its surface and many an oar ploughing through its surf, and the flags of all nations waving joyously together, with its rocks and wrecks, its storms and battles, yet reflecting serenely all that is beneath, and above, and around it,-if we gaze, and hearken to the strange sounds rushing past our ears in unbroken strains, it seems no longer a wild tumult, or ȧvýpiðμov yéλaoμa, but we feel as if placed within some ancient cathedral, listening to a chorus of innumerable voices; and the more intensely we listen, the more all discords melt away into higher harmonies, till at last we hear but one majestic trichord, or a mighty unison, as at the end of a sacred symphony. Such visions will float through the study of the grammarian, and in the midst of toilsome researches his heart will suddenly beat, as he feels the conviction growing upon him that men are brethren in the simplest sense of the word- the children of the same father-whatever their country, their colour, their language, and their faith. MAX MÜLLER. Note.-Circumstances over which I had no control made it impossible to carry out a uniform system of transcription in the letter on the Turanian Language and in the Tables appended to it. . The Languages of Asia and Europe arranged according to their Grammatical Principles. LIVING LANGUAGE S. Concentration of Chinese. Concentration of the Tungusic. -Concentration of the Finnic. (Scattered languages: Bask, Samoïedic, Caucasic.) Concentration of the Taïc. -Concentration of the Malaic -Concentration of the Bhotiya (Gangetic and Lohitic). Concentration of the Tamulic. STAGE. POLITICAL STAGE. NOMADIC STAGE. FAMILY ANTE DILUVIAN. FIRST APPENDIX. COMPARATIVE TABLE OF SUBJECTIVE AND PREDICATIVE COMPOUNDS. EXPLANATION OF LETTERS. Capitals are used to represent Verbal bases. Greek Letters to represent Pronouns. A. a. a. to represent a word in the Nominative, or as Subject. For instance: a. b. Nominal base as subject, followed by Nominal base as predicate: Hôtel-Dieu. = a. ß. Nominal base as subject, followed by Pronoun as predicate: Hebr. El-i, God (of) I, i.e. my God. (Different from fratelmo, i. e. fratellus meus.) = a. B. Nominal base as subject, followed by Verbal base as predicate. (Possible only if the verbal predicative base becomes an adjective.) |