Page:Essays on the Chinese Language (1889).djvu/22

8 them as the parent language of the world. Many, also, have believed that Chinese is one of the seventy or seventy-two tongues produced by as many angels when these were sent to stop the building of the impious tower in the plain of Shinar.

Dr. Edkins has tried to prove the "connection of Chinese and Hebrew" and of Chinese and other ancient languages. These, he thinks, had a common origin "in the Mesopotamian and Armenian region," a region to which distance of time and space lends great enchantment. According to Dr. Edkins, the first Chinese "were probably Hamites;" but the Chinese language, "like Mongol and Turkish, belongs to the Japhetic stock;" and yet "the ancient Hebrew and the ancient Chinese were probably dialects of a still more venerable mother speech which was truly antediluvian and began with Adam." So Chinese has an "antiquity of type" beyond other languages, for "being itself of the first descent from the primeval mother of human speech, we can trace in it no later elements."

Marshman, whose defects of learning are somewhat compensated by his cautious and conscientious spirit, could not find proof enough to satisfy him of an original connection between either Hebrew or Sanskrit and Chinese. He left the question undecided, though he would perhaps have liked to see an affinity established between this language and that of India.

Dr. Chalmers, in his study on the Origin of the Chinese, includes language in his attempt "to trace the connection of the Chinese with Western Nations." He takes 300 Chinese words and compares these with words of like meanings in Hebrew, Sanskrit, Greek, Arabic, Tibetan, and other languages. His opinion as to the affinities of the Chinese language is conditional, as the following sentence shows—"If the Chinese came into this land, from the original home of the human race, by the direct route, over the passes about Hindu-Cush, and through Tibet,