Vague though our notions about the time when Hebrew was first spoken be, we have the clearest dates as to the time of its disappeamnce as a liv ing language. When at the return from the exile all the ancient institutions were restored, it was found that the people no longer understood their own Scriptures in their vernacular, and a transla tion into Aramaic (out of which sprang the Tar gums) had to be added, so that they might under stand them.' It soon became, as we said, the lan guage of the schools and of public worship almost exclusively, somewhat like the Latin in the Middle Ages.
Closely allied to the Hebrew, as already observed by Augustine, Jerome, and others, is the Phcenician, which in our own days, with the increasing number of monuments brought to light, has risen to high importance. No lang-uage of antiquity perhaps was so widely spread. The whole ancient world almost being the vantage-ground of Phcenician en terprise, the language was naturally disseminated over the widest possible space, and the natural con sequence was, that gradually yielding to foreign influence it did not keep up its original purity, and became in proportion more and more diver gent from the Hebrew. Characteristic to it are certain inflexions it retained, which were long ob solete in Hebrew, no less than certain words and phrases, considered archaic in Hebrew, but of common occurrence in Phoenician. Again, there is a. tendency towards a darkening, so to say, of vowels —e. gr. the IIebrew a becomes occasion ally o, the e becomes i or y, the i changes into y or te, the o into re, and the like. The gutturals are at times interchanged, consonants are assimilated or omitted, etc. A grammar of this idiom has not been attempted yet, nor does the knowledge of the inflexions which we possess offer sufficient material for a systematic investigation at this pre sent moment. A 'few items towards it, however, are, that the Hebrew termination of the nominative in ak becomes at in Phcenician, that the formation of the pronoun differs, that there is a greater va riety of genitive forms in the Phcenician, etc. The abundance of Aramaism noticed in the language may have crept in at a late period only. The sur viving remnants consist merely of inscriptions on coins and stones, chiefly discovered in their co lonies. Of a written literature nothing has come down to us, save a few proper names and texts im bedded in a fearfully mutilated state in Greek and P-oman writings, and a few scraps of extracts from their writers translated into Greek, but of ex tremely doubtful genuineness. From all we can
gather there must have existed an immense number of Phcenician writings at a remote period of anti quity : chiefly of a theological or theogonical nature, whose authors were identified with the gods them selves. From the Phcenician is to be distinguished the Punic, a corrupted dialect of it, spoken in the western colonies up to the 7th century A. D. , while the mother-tongue had completely died out on its native soil as early as the 3d century. There was even a translation of the Bible extant in Punic, but not a trace of it has remained.
We now turn to the northern Shemitic or Aramaic' branch, spoken between the Mediter ranean and the Tigris ; north of Phcenicia, the land of the Israelites, and Arabia ; and south of the Taurus ; a dialect poorer both grammatically and phonetically than either of the two others. Its pe culiarities, moreover, are much of the nature of provincialisms, or perhaps even point to a stage of corruption of language. Thus it is not the change of vowel which produces the passive mood, but a special prefix (r1N) ; the article does not be,,in but end the word ; the sibilants are hardened (ce nni, gold ; MD, rock ; Z111, return), etc. The earliest trace of its distinction from the Hebrew is the well-known translation of Jacob's ilb.1 into NTITTV nr. A very difficult question, and one, we fear, not to be solved before further progress in our knowledge of cuneiform literature has been made, is that of the language of Babylonia. That Aramaic was spoken there is undoubted, but whether it was the only idiom prevalent, as in Syria and Mesopotamia, or whether the Chaldans. who had conquered Babylonia had brought with them another non-Shemitic (Medo -Persian) language 'akin to the Assyrian,' has been the subject of long discussions. But even granted that Chaldan' was akin to Assyrian, it need not therefore by any means have been a non-Shemitic language. It is, on the contrary, now assumed almost unanimously to be Shemitic ; how far, however, it differs from the other dialects, and in particular what may have been its direct or indirect influence upon Aramaic, we cannot here investigate.