His Semitic stock of languages he constructs from the following nations, who form another compact mass, and represent one physiologically and historically connected family : the Hebrews, with the other tribes of Canaan or Palestine, inclusive of the Phoenicians, who spread their language, through their colonization, as that of the Carthaginians ; the Aramaic tribes, or the historical nations of Aram, Syria, Mesopotamia, and Babylonia, speaking Syrian in the west, and the so-called Chaldaic in the east ; finally, the Arabians, whose language is connected (through the Himyaritic) with the Ethiopic, the ancient (now the sacred) language of Abyssinia.
Dr. Hang divides the Iranian languages into East or Bactrian, and West or Median and Persian.
The Iranian family of language seems to be called Aryan by Mr. Farrar ; it is the Indo European and Indo-Germanic of some philo logists; Pictet and Burnous called it Aryan, from the Sanskrit word Arya, meaning noble ; Rask called it Japhetic. According to Mr. Farrar, it has eight divisions, viz. Hindu, Persian, Greek, Latin, Lithuanian, Sclavonic, Teutonic, Celtic. Of these it is uncertain whether Celtic or Sanskrit represents the older phase. But it is known that all of them are the daughters of a primeval form of language which has now ceased to exist, but which was spoken by a yet undivided race at a time when Sanskrit and Greek bad as yet only implicit existence.
Professor Steinthal, in his Charakteristik der haupts'achlichsten Typen des Sprachbaues, has proposed to arrange all languages into two great classes, viz. cultivated languages and uncultivated languages, and each of these he would subdivide into two classes. viz. the isolating and the inflect ing. Taking the uncultivated firsq under the isolating class he proposed to place the Trans Gangetic, and under the inflecting he would place three divisions — (1) the Polynesian, which ex presses all the minor modifications of the meaning, all distinctions of declension and conjugation, by reduplications and prefixes; (2) the Ural-Altaic (which Farrar calls the Alatyan), which expresses them by annexing separate words after the root ; and (3) the American, which expresses them by amalgamation. The cultivated languages are similarly subdivided — (1) into the isolating, represented by Chinese ; (2) into the inflectional, under which head he places (i.) the Egyptian, which achieves a sort of inflection by a loose addition of grammatical elements ; the Semitic, by internal modification of the root ; and (iii.) the Aryan, throughout which the formal elements have been reduced to mere conventional suffixes, such, for instance, as the letter s, which is an all but universal sign for the plural number.
Professor Max Muller arranges all languages, exclusive of Chinese and the dialects of America and Africa, into three grammatical families, the Semitic, the Aryan, and the Turanian.
The whole of what is called the Turanian family of speech consists of terminational or agglutinat ive languages, and this Turanian family comprises in reality all languages spoken in Asia and Europe, and not included under the Aryan and Semitic families, with the exception of Chinese and its cognate dialects. The term Turanian is used in opposition to Aryan, and is applied to the nomadic races of Asia, as opposed to the agricultural or Aryan ]aces. The Turanian family of languages has two great divisions, the Northern and the Southern. The Northern is sometimes called the Ural-Altaic or Ugro-Tatarie, and it is divided into five sections.
It is, however, more than probable that the Mongol, the Manchu, and Tungusan belong to one great stock, that the Turkoman, as well as the Tshude, Fin, Laplander, and Magyar (Hungarians) present another stock closely united, and that both these families arc originally connected with each other.
Turkish is a Turanian dialect. Its grammar is purely Tataric or Turanian, and the Turks possessed a small literature and narrow civilisa tion before they were converted to Muham madanism; but as the language of 3fahomed was Arabic, this, together with the Koran, and their law and religion, the Turks learned from the Arabs. Arabic became to the Turks what Latin was to the Germans during the middle ages ; and there is hardly a word in the higher intellectual terminology of Arabic that might not be used, more or less naturally, by a writer in Turkish. But the Arabs, again, at the very outset of their career of conquest and conversion, had been, in science, art, literature, and polite manners, the pupils of the Persians, whom they had conquered; they stood to them in the same relation as the Romans stood to the Greeks. Now, the Persians speak a language which is a branch of the Indo European or Aryan family of speech. A large infusion of Persian words thus found its way into Arabic, and through Arabic into Turkish, and the result is that the Turkish language, as spoken by the higher ranks at Constantinople, is so over grown with Persian and Arabic words, that an uneducated Turk from the country understands but little of the so-called Osmanli, though its grammar is exactly the same as the grammar which be uses in his Tataric utterance.