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304 synthetic or an analytic way, that of the Semites has generated very little; its proneness is rather to the multiplication of such distinctions as are called conjugational, to the characterizing of the verbal action as in its nature transitive, causal, intensive, iterative, conative, reflexive, or the like: thus, qatala meaning 'he killed,' qattala means 'he killed with violence, massacred;' qātala, 'he tried to kill;' aqtala, 'he caused to kill;' inqatala, 'he killed himself;' and so on. Each Arabic verb has theoretically fifteen such conjugations; and near a dozen of them, each with its own passive, are in tolerably frequent and familiar use; in the other dialects, the scheme is less completely filled out. Verbal nouns and adjectives, or infinitives and participles, belong likewise to every conjugation.

In their nouns, the Semites distinguish only two genders, masculine and feminine. They have, of course, the same three numbers here as in the verb. Distinctions of case, however, are almost entirely deficient; only the Arabic makes a scanty separation of nominative and accusative, or of nominative, genitive, and accusative; and opinions still differ as to whether this is to be regarded as a separate acquisition made by the Arabic alone, or as an original possession of the whole family, lost by the other branches: the latter is probably the correcter view.

The simple copula, the verb to be, is generally wanting in the Semitic languages: for "the man is good" they say, "the man good" (often with a form of the adjective which indicates that it is used predicatively, rather than attributively), or "the man, he good." They are poor in connectives and particles; and this, with the deficiency of modal forms in the verb, gives to their syntax a peculiar character of simplicity and baldness: the Semite strings his assertions together, just putting one after the other, with an and or a but interposed, where the Indo-European twines his into a harmoniously proportioned and many-membered period. The same stiffness and rigidity which these languages show in respect to word-development appears also in their development of signification. While it is characteristic of our mode of speech that we use such words as comprehend,