iii. 10. 6, ' Arraped = rm.= ; 7. t, oDs Xavalas iccadicn= WirO, etc.
Syriac' is the designation of an idiom used since the second Christian century in the church, which, though written in different characters (Estrangelo), is yet so closely akin to Aramman that up to this day the opinions are divided as to the propriety of making any difference at all between the two. As distinguishing marks between them have been ad duced, principally, the darker ' vocalisation of Syriac—o for a, au or ai for o.or i, etc.—its differ ent accentuation, its as the prefix of the 3d pers. future for the Aramaic the formation of the Syriac infinite by n, and its greater wealth of words, chiefly taken from the Greek ; all of which, however, to gether with other peculiarities, are reduced by the advocates of the unity of both dialects to provincial differences and to the peculiar circumstances of the times. But here again, without entering morc fully into the question, we can only venture the statement that there seems to be a great prinzd fircie proba bility at least for their being radically identical ; only let it not be forgotten that in order to be able to form a real judgment it will be first of all neces sary that carefully-prepared editions of the litera tures of both should be in our hands. Something has been done for the comparatively poor Syriac branch ; for the Aramaic, nothing. That, how ever, the present Maronite dialect, as well as those of the Jacobites, Nestorians, and other Chaldee Christians, is essentially different from both Syriac and Aramaic, is undoubted : just as the vulgar Arabic spoken in Morocco and Algeria differs from classical Arabic [ARAmdic ; SYRIAC].
The Southern or Arabic' branch presents to us the most remarkable phenomenon of one special idiom—the Arabic—suddenly, ds it were, starting out of utter obscurity as the richest, most complete, and most refined among its sister idioms, at a time comparatively modern. and exactly when the two other branches seemed to have accomplished their mission, and what remained of their life was merely artificial. So exquisitely finished and so boundlessly wealthy, both lexically and grammati cally, has it been from the moment when it first became known, that, as there was no unripe in fancy and no struggling growth observable in it, so there was also no age, and far less a decay. It thus ranks as the freshest and youngest :' precisely in the same sense as the Hebrew may be styled the oldest' among the Shemitic idioms—not, as we said above, on account of its having in reality pm ceded the others, or still less of its having given birth to the others, but because for some reason or other its growth stopped at a certain period, and it seems to have retained its ancient physiognomy, while its sister dialects went on developing and renewing themselves as much as in them lay and circumstances permitted. As the Arabic was in the 6th century, so it remained almost unchanged up to our day, except perhaps that in absorbing foreigm, especially Greek elements of culture, it did not assimilate them quite in the same congenial manner as an Indo Germanic idiom would have done. But for all that this language must have an age equal at least to that of the other two sister dialects. There are traces of its peculiarities—peculiarities which divide it as sharply as can be from thetn—to be found in the earliest records of the O. T. We have, e. g.
the article (the Hebrew [jr1) in lin9N, (Gen. x.
26), and further in words like t:tymre,], in)pcz, The phenomenon, further, of a real declension by the change of the termination of the cases, by certain 'broken' plurals, etc., together with many forms of its conjugation, entirely and radically unknown to Shemitic as represented by its other dialects, proves its early and most independent existence. That, further, the Arabs stood in great renown for wisdom, or what we should now call literary proficiency—if this be not a misnomer for a time when writing was unknown among them— in the earliest historical times, seems clear enough from the queen of Sheba's being an Arab queen, the friends of Job being Arabs, and Solomon's own wisdom being compared to the wisdom of the Arabs. How it came to pass that absolutely no thing should have survived of all that literature which certainly must have been produced among them is a phenomenon no less remarkable. Al
though two facts must be borne in mind always—viz. that it all was oral and that it was in verse, or at least in a rhythmical form adapted to those early pro verbial sayings and poems of which a vague Arabic tradition still speaks ; and Mohammed, for reasons of his own, discouraged, nay condemned, poetry— the sole vehicle of all science, all tradition, all religion, before him, in the time of ignorance.' A comparison between the Arabic and the two other branches most strikingly shows that super abundance, lexically and grammatically, of the former over the two latter of which we spoke. No one, the Arabs hold, could, without being inspired, keep the whole wealth of their language in his me mory. For not only have single words (sword, lion, serpent, etc.), hundreds and thousands of nu ances of terms, but many a single Word has untold numbers of different meanings. The number of its root and words is like 3, respectively to, to those of the Hebrew—such as the monuments of both now are in our hands. No doubt, had more survived of the Hebrew literature, the proportion would not have been quite as startling—for we now have only fragments of its religious writings to compare with the endless series of historical, po etical, philological, astronomical, and other Arabic literature ; a literature which indeed does not leave a single part of science or belles lettres uncultivated, and which spreads over about eight hundred years– subsequently to the time of Greece and Rome. Nor can the brilliant Hebrew literature that sprang up in the middle ages, partly through Arabic influence, be taken into account. Arabic, though its classi cal ' period may be closed with Mohammed, never became Neo-Arabic, while the difference between classical Hebrew and late Hebrew, which had to coin new words at every turn, is quite unmistak able. Arabic grammar shows the same ascend. ency over that of its sister idioms as does its dic tionary. It has twice as many forms of conjugation as the Hebrew, itself richer than the Amniaic by the Hiphal, the futnrurn paragog. and apocop. etc. The Arabic has, besides, over both the advantage of a comparative, and of a dua/ in the verb. The Hebrew rr'S verbs, which in Aramaic are hardly distinguishable from the N'$, in Arabic split into the two distinct forms of Ir'9 and 4'9 ; just as many a Hebrew root with more than one signification appears in Arabic as a variety of roots, by a slight change of a consonant. Nay, of these, it has five more than the Hebrew and Aramaic. It has also, through the amplitude of its vocalisation, the charm of a more sonorous, a fuller ancl richer tone and colour than either. But it must also be acknow ledged that the harmonious flow of the more an. cient idioms, their unfettered ease and freedom, together with a number of peculiar forms, like the parallelism with its exquisite natural beauty, is lost to a peat extent in the _Arabic, in which the work of the schools, their pedantic striving after a consum mate correctness of expression, and their rhetori cal painting of the lily,' is often painfully clear. But to the Arabic alone is also due the spread of Shemitic—which had been carried atomically, so to speak, by the Phcenicians to the ends of the earth, but which, with a few isolated exceptions, never really struck root anywhere—to an extent never dreamed of by any ancient or even modern language ; a spread that has not ceased yet, but is enlarging its circles from year to year, together with Islam itself. It is, however, as we said, only the last century before Mohammed, that has left us a few traces of preislamic literature. From the time of Moham med it grew with exotic rapidity into one of the most widely and brilliantly cultivated. It em braced well nigh all the branches of human know ledge and research. Theology, medicine, philo sophy, philology, history, mathematics, geography, astronomy, etc., are most extensively represented— though as yet only a beginning has been made in making the treasures of information these works contain as widely useful as they might be made. From the t4th century, however, the glory of Arabic literature began to wane.