Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/327

VIII.] , forgive, as if they originally and always meant just what we employ them to express—not giving a thought to the metaphor, often striking, or even startling, which they contain—in the Semitic, the metaphor usually shows plainly through, and cannot be lost sight of. The language of the Semite, then, is rather pictorial, forcible, vivid, than adapted to calm and reasoning philosophy.

The various dialects of this family stand in a very close relationship with one another, hardly presenting such differences even as are found within the limits of a single branch of the Indo-European family: they are to one another like German, Dutch, and Swedish, for example, rather than like German, Welsh, and Persian. This fact, however, does not at all prove their separation to have taken place at a later period than that of the Indo-European branches; for, during its whole recorded history, Semitic speech has shown itself far less variable, less liable to phonetic change and corruption, less fertile of new words and forms, of new themes and apparent roots, than our own. And the reasons, at least in part, are not difficult to discover. Each Semitic word, as a general rule, presents distinctly to the consciousness of him who employs it its three radical consonants, with its complement of vowels, each one of which has a recognized part to play in determining the significance of the word, and cannot be altered, or exchanged for another, without violating a governing analogy, without defacing its intelligibility. The genesis of new forms, moreover, is rendered well-nigh impossible by the fact that such a thing as a Semitic compound is almost totally unknown: the habit of the language, from its earliest period, has forbidden that combination of independent elements which is the first step toward their fusion into a form. Hence everything in Semitic speech wears an aspect of peculiar rigidity and persistence. In its primitive development—as development we cannot but believe it to have been, however little comprehensible by us—it assumed so marked and individual a type that it has since been comparatively exempt from variation. In no other family of human speech would it be possible that the most antique and original of its dialects, the fullest in its forms, the most