Page:The American Cyclopædia (1879) Volume XIV.djvu/787

 SEMITIC RACE AND LANGUAGES 761 oped muscles, and symmetrical extremities. It is generally assumed that there is a marked difference between the intellectual develop- ment of the Karaites and Semites proper. If the Egyptians, Assyrians and Babylonians, and Phoenicians are essentially Hamitic, the Sem- ites must be considered inferior to them. The Hamites were rather an agricultural race. They early organized into states and empires, and centralized the executive power. They erect- ed colossal monuments and edifices, like the pyramids of Egypt and the palaces of Assyria. Their minds had essentially an objective ten- dency, and their materialism found utterance in the lascivious religious rites of the Baby- lonians, and in the strange views and worship of the people of the Nile. Their literature was principally historical, though recent Assyrian ind Egyptian discoveries have also brought to light literary productions in other arts and sciences. The peoples designated as Semites proper were generally nomadic. They con- sisted of independent tribes, which united under some form of patriarchal government. They lived in tents, and had but little taste for architecture and other plastic arts. The Hebrews and Arabs, however, have displayed a peculiar versatility of mind, which allowed them to build up states in various forms, adapt the arts and sciences of other nations, develop extensive literatures, and produce the foremost religions of the world. Monotheism prevails in the religious conceptions of the Semites proper, and the lyric element in their poe- try. To the Hamito-Semitic peoples the civil- ized world is indebted also for the art of wri- ting. The Greeks borrowed their alphabet from the Phoenicians, who imitated the hiero- glyphs of the Egyptians. (See WRITING.) LANGUAGES. No comparative grammar of the Semitic languages proper, or of the Hamitic group alone, much less of the entire Hamito- Semitic family, has been written, and hence it is not fully established in what their common linguistic property consists. There are many minor treatises on special branches of Semitic comparative philology, but no one has even attempted to sum up the general results so far reached, which are very meagre. The opinion that the Assyro-Babylonian language of the cuneiform inscriptions is the Sanskrit of the Semitic family, rests on a very insecure foun- dation of philological facts. It cannot be de- nied that the Canaauite group of peoples, He- brews and Phoenicians, spoke languages much akin to Babylonian ; Aramaic manifests a sim- ilar relationship by the prevalence of reflexive formations, the want of an article, the tran- scription of the genitive by a relative pronoun, and by the assimilation of the nasal in nun verbs. But on the other hand it is much more consistent with the principles applied to the Indo-European family to allow the claim of priority to the Arabic language, and to con- sider the other Semitic tongues as shortened or shrunken forms of it, or as having pro- ceeded from a primordial language of which Arabic is now the representative. The mutual connection of the Semitic idioms proper is very close, so much so that they seem to be dialects of a single tongue, and the differences between them are no greater than between the subdi- visions of any branch of the Indo-European family. Ordinarily the type of Semitic speech is spoken of as being inflective like the Indo- European languages ; but it does not necessa- rily follow that both families are of one ori- gin, even if the system of inflection in Semi- tic were much more like the Aryan than it is. What is above all characteristic of the Semi- tic languages is the triliterality of the roots, which in Indo-European tongues are always monosyllabic. Then again, while Indo-Euro- pean roots are vocalic in form, the Semitic are consonantal. In Semitic the vowel is sub- ordinate, and changeable in inflection, while the consonant is not. The vowel determines only the manner or form of the idea or thing conceived; the idea itself can only be repre- sented by consonants. There is sometimes a semblance of a vocalic root, but there is none such in fact. There are many reasons for con- cluding that the roots originally numbered only two consonants, and that the triliters and plu- riliters are subsequent developments. Accord- ing to E. Meier, the third radical consonant must be regarded as a reduplication of the ori- ginally monosyllabic root, and he has under- taken in his Hebraisches Wurzelworterbuch to analyze the entire root matter of the Hebrew verbs, and to reduce the triliters to radicals of two consonants only. In the opinion of many Semitic scholars, however, his theory is an illu- sion. The fact that all the Semitic phonetical graphic systems, among which the Egyptian hieroglyphs and the Assyrian cuneiforms are not included, are composed of consonants only, is of great significance. Some of them have a larger number of letters than the Phoenician alphabet from which they are derived, but the nature of the sounds and the manner of utter- ing them remain the same, and the additional ones are only reduplicated forms of them. Though the graphic systems are of the same origin, and are of a distinctive character con- stituting them a separate family among the methods of writing, yet they may be sub- divided into two groups : one consisting of the primitive Hebrew and Samaritan, and called the Hebrew-Samaritan group ; the other com- prising Palmyrene, Pamphylian, the square Hebrew characters, Estranghelo and the oth- er Syriac alphabets, the Sabaean or Mendai- tic, the Auranitic, the Nabathean and the Ara- bic, Cufic, and Neshky, and known as the Arama?an group. While the latter subdivision is a direct descendant from the early Aramae- an style of writing, the former is a derivate from the archaic Hebrew of the inscriptions. The line of descent will be easily seen on com- paring the following alphabets with those giv- en in the article PHOENICIA, vol. xiii., p. 456 :