SEMITIC LANGUAGES. Hebrew, Chaklee, Syriac; Arabic, Ethiopic, and Arnharic are all but dialects of one original language, and constitute one family of speech, the Semitic. The following nations form a compact mass, and represent one physiologically and historically connected family, viz. the Hebrews, with the other tribes ot 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, Meso potamia, and Babylonia, spealing 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) languaae of Abyssinia. The language spoken by Abraholi when he left Mesopotamia closely resembled the Hebrew, and his own name was Semitic. Moreomer a dialect of the same tongue is still spoken by'the Kaldi (Chaldazans) of Kurdistan who, there is good reason to suppose, are the descendants of the ancient Assyria,ns. The common origin of their languages, is, however, the only connecting bond which unites the widely-separated Semitic nations, —Hebrews, Babylonians, Plicenicians, Cartha ginians, and Arabs. The Arab, the Hebrew, and the Palestine descendants of Ternh were noinade tiihes. The Plicenician, the Syrian, and the people of Mesopo tin nia and Yemen formed civilised nationalities. In Semitic words the root reinains always distinct and unmistakeable. In Aryan, on the contrary, it soon becomes altered and disguised. Hence Seinitic dictionaries aro mostly arranged according to the roots, a method which in Aryan languages would be most inconvenient, the root being often obscure, and in many cases doubtful. The Amharic., as also the Hebrew and Syriac, is derived from tile Western .Aramozi. Eichhorn adopted the term Semitic from Silent ; the language is the oriental language of some author, the Syro-Arabian of Farrer, and the Arabic of Leibnitz.
The Semitic family of languages is divided by Professor Max Muller into three branches,—the Aramaic, the Hebraic, and the Arabic. The
Aramaic occupies the north, including Syria, Mesopotamia, and part of the ancient kingdoms of Babylonia and Assyria. It is known to us chiefly in two dialects, the Syriac and Chaldee. The former name is given to the language which has been preserved to us in a translation of the Bible (the Peshito) ascribed to the 2d century, and in rich Christian literature dating from tho fourth. It is still spoken, though in a very corrupt form, by the Nestorians of Kurdistan, near the lakes of Aran and Urutnia, and by some Christian tribes in Mesopotamia ; and an attempt has been made by the American missionaries stationed at Urmia to restore this dialect to some grammatical cor rectness by publishing translations and a grammar of what they call the Neo-Syriac language. The name of Chaldee has been given to the language adopted by the Jews during the Babylonian captivity. Though the Jews always retained a knowledge of their sacred language, they soon began to adopt the dialect of their conquerors, not for conversation only, but also for literary composition. The book of Ezra contains frag ments in Chaldee, contemporaneous with the cuneiform inscriptions of Darius and Xerxes, and several of the apocryphal books, though preserved to us in Greek only, were most likely composed originally in Chaldee, and not in Ilebrew. The so-called Targums, again, or translations and paraphrases of the Old Testatnent, written during the centuries immediately preceding and following the Christian era, give us another specimen of the Aramaic, or the language of Babylonia, as transplanted to Palestine. Thi8 Aramaic was the dialect spoken by tho Lord Jesus Christ and his , disciples. The few authentic words preserved in the New Testament as spoken by our Lord in Ins own language, such as Talitha kurni, Maranatha, Abba, are not in Hebrew, but in the Chaldee or Aramaic, as then spoken by the Jews.