And leaving altogether the ever-shifting quick sands of this lexical affinity between the two families, which, as we said, cannot but be accepted in the main as an established fact, we come to the more safe and easy ground of their grammatical difference. This may be summed up briefly in the above-men tioned present triliteral nature of the Shemitic roots ; and in the peculiarity of the three consonants that constitute them representing the idea, and the ever changing vowels added to them its ever-changing aspects, varieties, and modifications. The con sonants of the Shemitic root form, in this wise, without the accessory vowels, an unpronounceable word, while the Indo-Germanic root or word is complete and self-sufficient. Among further most vital differences between the two, we may point to the totally different way of the declensions of their nouns (cf. the Shemitic status constructus and em phaticus), the numerous verbal modes utterly un known to the Aryan conjugation, the absence of a definite tense in Shemitic, the inability of the latter of forming compound nouns or new nuances of verbs by prepositions, and the like. All of which crip ples the action of the Shemitic idioms to no small extent, while the unlimited power of forming words upon words at the spur of the moment, and the marvellous flexibility of the verb and the precision of its tenses, endow the Aryan with unequalled wealth, power, and elegance.
This most fittingly leads us to the question of the respective ages ' of these two prominent fa milies of languages. Not that to the one or' the other is to be assigned a longer, more ancient term of existence—for this notion of the direct parentage is, as we said, confined to bygone unscientific cen turies, and to the Delitzsch-Dirst school : if there be one. But it may fairly be asked—and this is by no means a barren speculation—which may have retained its ancient stamp with greater fidelity, and which thus reflects best the shape of its origi nal ? And there can be but one answer. The more simple, child-like, primitive of the two is, without any doubt, the Shemitic. Abstraction and meta physics, philosophy and speculation, as we find them in the Aryan, are not easily expressed in an idiom bereft of all real syntactic structure ; bereft further of that infinite variety of little words, par ticles, conjunctions, auxiliary verbs, etc., which, ready for any emergency, like so many small living links, imperceptibly bind word to word, phrase to phrase, and period to periOd : which indeed are the very life and soul of what is called Construction. This want of exactness and precision, moreover, naturally inherent in idioms represented by words of dumb sounds, whose meaning must be deter mined according to circumstances by a certain limited number of shifting vowels, whose conju gations, though varied and flexible to an extra ordinary degree, yet lack a proper distinction between the past and the future (cf. the Hebrew
'perfect' and aorist,' which lend themselves to almost any tense betvveen past and future). There certainly is—who can doubt it ?—notwithstanding all these shortcomings, a strength, a boldness, a pic turesqueness, a delicacy of feeling and expression about these Shemitic idioms which marks them, one and all, as the property of a poetically, not to say prophetically' inspired race. But compare with this the suppleness of Aryan languages and that boundless supply of aids that enable them to produce the most telling combinations at the spur of the moment ; their exquisitely consummate and refined syntactical development, that can change, and shift, and alter the position of word, and phrase, and sentence, and period, to almost any place, so as to give force to any part of their speech. With all these, and a thousand other faculties and capabilities, they might certainly at first sight almost lead one to the belief that they must have grown upon another stock—the Shemitic —and outgrown it. But discarding this unscientific notion, it cannot be denied that they are the younger' of the two. The stage of Realism, as represented by the former, must naturally have preceded that of Idealism, of which the Aryan alone is the proper type and expression. The Shemitic use of the materialistic, sensual,' term for physiological and psychological phenomena must be older than the formation and common usage of the Aryan abstract term. The name for the outward tangible impression which must have everywhere been identical originally with that of the sensation or idea connected with it, has remained iden tical in the Shemitic from its earliest stage to its final development. It is, in fact, this unity of idea and expression, which, above all other symptoms, forces us irresistibly to place the Shemitic into the first rank as regards antiquity,' such as we ex plained it ; that is, of its having retained the closest likeness to some original form of human speech that preceded both the other family of language and itself.
The signs characteristic of the common Shemitic stock have been touched upon already in the fore going paragraphs, as far as they could be brought to bear upon the questions under consideration. To these we may now add tbe peculiarity of there being but two genders in Shemitic, and that these are also distinguished in the second and third person of the verb ; that, further, the genitive is formed by the juxtaposition merely of the two respective nouns, slightly changed in their vocalisa tion, while prepositions principally form the other cases, and suffixes indicate the oblique cases of onouns.