SHEMITIC, or rather SEMITIC LAN GUAGES,* a term commonly applied to a certain number of cognate idioms supposed to have been spoken by the Shemites—i. e. the descendants of ; Shem. Considering, however, that the Canaan ites and the Phcenicians, the Cushites and a num ber of Arabic tribes, all derived in the genea logical list of Genesis x. from Cham, a'id speak Shemitic,' while Elam and Lud derived from Shem did not, as far as our present information goes (Ashur has now the benefit of a strong doubt) :— that designation, first advocated by Eichhorn and Schlozer, must be pronounced a complete misno mer, although it has kept its ground up to this moment for sheer want of a precise and accurate term. It has supplanted that other one, used from the Church Fathers downward, of Oriental Lan guages ;' a denomination perfectly satisfactcuy to the 'linguistic consciousness ' of generations that viewed Hebrew as the mother of all languages, and whose acquaintance with Eastern idioms was limited to this and an imperfect idea of Phcenico-Punic, Chaldee ' — Jewish or Christian — and Arabic. But when, towards the end of the last century, the gigantic discoveries in the realm of Eastern philology suddenly made these idioms shrink into the small proportions of a family of dialects con fined for a long period to a narrow corner of the south-west of Asia ; that most comprehensive name of Oriental Languages had, notwithstanding single protests, to be put aside for ever. Leibnitz's sug gestion of 'Arabic' being too narrow for the whole stock, Syro-Arabic,' formed in analogy to Indo European,' was proposed, but that too has not been found generally expressive enough, apart from the objection of its being apt to be erroneously understood in a linguistical rather than in a geo graphical sense. Thus, in default of a better name, the above will probably be retained for some time to come, with the distinct understanding of its being a false and merely conventional expression.
Comparative philology, although, compared with what we now understand by this term, a vety em bryonic one, exercised itself at an early period, and in a vague manner, in these idioms. The re semblance between them is indeed so striking at first sight—its roots being as nearly identical as can be—that it could hardly have been otherwise. It is the difference between them rather than the similarity that requires a closer scrutiny in order to be discovered at all. As it is, they do not vary among themselves to the extent even of the dia lects in any single group of the Indo-European languages. Yet, as we shall further show, the idea still entertained by not a few scholars—viz. of one of the Shemitic languages standing in the relation of maternity to another—must now be utterly discarded, and all that can be granted to the speculative Science of Language ' is tbe possibility of some kind of extinct prototype, out of which they might have individually developed. Exactly as there is an Idea ' (in the Platonic sense) of a primmval mother of all the Indo-European tongues floating before the minds of our modern investigators.
Meanwhile, the existence of three distinct She mitic ' dialects of independent existence, each bear ing a clearly-marked individuality of its own in historical times, has been established beyond all doubt ; and, as usual, different names and divisions have been proposed for them. The most widely adopted and the most rational ones are those that are taken from the abodes of the different tribes who first spoke them. Thus we have : a. The northern or north-eastern branch—i.e. that of the whole country between the Mediterranean and the Tigris, bordered by the Taurus in the north ; by Phcenicia, the land of Israel, and Arabia, in the south ; and embracing Syria, Mesopotamia (with its different Arams'), and Babylonia. This is called the Aramaic' branch. b. The idiom spoken by the inhabitants of Palestine : Hebraic.' And c. That of the south or the peninsula of Arabia —` Arabic ;' the idiom confined to this part up to the time of Mohammed. Another recent divi sion is the so-called historical, framed in accord ance with the preponderance of these special branches at different periods. By this the Hebraic would assume the first place, extending from the earliest times of our knowledge of it down to the 6th century B. C. , when the Aramaic begins to take the lead, and the field of Hebrew and Phce nician—the chief representatives of Hebraic—be comes more and more restricted. The Aramaic again
would be followed by the Arabic period, dating from the time of Mohammed, when the Islam and its conquests spread the language of the Koran, not merely over the whole Shemitic territoiy, but over a vast portion of the inhabited globe. But this last division is so arbitrary, not to say fal lacious--for there is every reason to suppose that 'Aramaic' flourished vigorously in its own sphere during, if not before the whole Hebraic peri3d, and again that 'Hebraic' (as Phcenician) kept its ground simultaneously with the later Aramaic ' period— that its own authors had to hedge it in with many and variegated restrictions. So that it is, in fact, reduced simply to a 'subjective' notion or method, not further to be considered. But we further pro test all tbe inore strongly against it, as it might easily lead to the belief that the one idiom gradually merged into the other—Hebrew into Aramaic, Aramaic into Arabic, much as Latin did into the Valgare—which would be utterly contrary to fact. The vulgar Arabic spoken now in Palestine no more developed out of Aramaic, than the English spoken in Ireland developed out of Celtic or 'Fenian.' Sinking for a moment the distinctions between these different Sbemitic idioms, and viewing them as one compact Unity, more especially in compari son with that other most important family, the Indo European languages, we are struck, as were the Church Fathers and the meclimval grammarians, with more signs of primaeval affinity than their mere identity of word-roots. And indeed, if this had constituted our sole proof and ciiterion, the circle of relationship would have had to be widened to an astonishingly large extent. One of the chief and indisputable characteristics of Shemitic has, since the days of Chajug, been held to be their triliteralness. That is, that every word consists, in the 5rst instance, merely of three consonants, which form, so to say, the soul of the idea to be expressed by that word ; while the respective special modifications are produced by certain vowels or additional letters. Some of the latter have, in a few instances, remained sta tionary, but even then they are always clearly dis tinguishable front the root, as mere casual acces sories. But these very additional and on/y casually annexed consonants have led investigation to doubt that time-hallowed axiom of triliteralness. - So far, it has been said. from this being a primaeval inborn attribute of these idioms, nay, a sign of their having been handed down (especially in the He braic form) as nearly like their original prototype as can be : it is rather a sign of a very advanced stage of a development in which they all partici pated, and which renders them almost as unlike their primitive type as any foreign group of lan guages. There must have been a time, it is con tended, when not three, but two radicals with an intermediate vowel—a monosyllable in fact—formed the staple of some original Shemitic ' language. Out of this they may have sprung simultaneously, by one of those linguistic revolutions consequent upon sudden historical events—emigrations and the like. Not indeed in the sharply-outlined form in which we now find them, but predisposed to their development of linguistic individual peculiarities : one and all however bent upon the extension of their monosyllabic root into a triliteral—in a way that the consonant prefixed should express what nuances an advancing civilisation found it necessary to distinguish in every one of the scanty roots forming the common stock of the whole Shemitic family. These bi literals, to which the roots thus are traced back, are nearly all of an onomatopoetical nature that is, they are imitative sounds of a primitive kind. As long as they were used, the untold grammatical distinctions of an advanced human stage—flexions, categories, constructions—could, if they existed at all, only have existed in an embryonic state. —The authors and defenders of this ingenious conjecture—the un expected use of which we shall presently show— fail, however, to answer the question, when and how this most extraordinary step from two to three letters could so suddenly and simultaneously have been_ introduced as must needs be presupposed. Not one of the monosyllabic languages known to us has ever changed its roots in this extraordinary manner, and the adduced analogy of the quadri literals having been formed from the triliterals is not to the point.