We have here spoken only of the chief repre sentative of the Arabic branch, the Arabic itself— still spoken nozy in the whole south-west of Asia, in the north and east of Africa, in Malta, partly even in India, and everywhere in fact where Mo hammedanism reigns supreme—which was origi nally the diale,ct of one tribe only, viz. the Ko reish. The ancient traditions speak of Cahtanic and ismaelitic dialects : but at present we can only make a vague distinction between those of Yemen and of Hedjaz, during the anteislamic times. As the Koreish in the north-west were the spokesmen, as it were, of the latter, so the Himyars or Homerites made their dialect the predominant one in the South, until the Koran swept it completely out of Arabia, and, save a few scattered quotations imbedded in later writings, and some partly mutilated inscriptions of difficult reading and more difficult understanding, every trace of it in its original form has disappeared. The Ethiopic or Geez alone, v:hich was spoken up to the 14th century in Abyssinia, seemed to have come nearest to it. But considering the scantiness of its own literary remains, which are chiefly of a theological nature (partly unpublished), and as such subject to the influence of foreign (European) missionaries—who also left their imprint upon it in its exceptional writing from left to right ; con sidering further the small progress we have as yet made in deciphering the Himyaritic, nothing but a very cautious judgment on the relation of the two can be pronounced- The Amharic, a barba rous • Gheez dialect, stauds, so to say, on the utmost line of the Arabic Shemite, and deserves but a passing mention. The idioms of the Gallas,
Harntonga, and a number of other tribes, how ever, no longer belongs to the Shemitic, notwith standing some outer resemblances which have misled former investigators.
Respecting the visible representation of the She mitic Languages, it may be broadly observed that writing, which in no language fully expresses all the sounds in their various shades, has, in the Shemitic Languages this additional imperfection, mat only the consonants—the skeleton of the word—are re presented by real letters, while the vowels originally are either entirely omitted, or only the longer ones are expressed by certain consonants (matres lecti onis). It was only at a comparatively late period that also the minor vowels were added in the shape of little strokes and dots above or below the line, but this aid too is only intended for less practised readers. Arabic and Hebrew are still commonly written and printed without vowels. Another point is the direction of the Shemitic writing from right to left (of which only modern Ethiopic makes an exception), a peculiarity still inherent in the alter nate line of the Boustrophedon of the early Greeks. The nearest approach to the most ancient form of the Shemitic characters is found in the Phcenician, from which also all our European alphabets are derived [ARABIC LANGUAGE ; ARAMAIC ; HE BREW ; WRITING, etcl—E. D.