Page:The New International Encyclopædia 1st ed. v. 17.djvu/854

* SEMITES. 776 SEMITIC LANGUAGES. sfroiigor among the Persians. The xmconipromis- in" reotitude of spirit that led the Teuton to in- vi^ve Odin himself in the twilight of the gods heoause of his moral delinquencies is only ap- ])roaehed in the Book of Job. Yahweli may re- I)ent of what lie lias done, but lie is not punished for hi-i errors. Without the imi)aet of ideas es- sentially foreign to his native modes of thought, and recognized as such by his kindred, no Semite has ever risen to the conception of moral auton- omy. The question why one course of action should be preferred to another has been uni- versally answered by the Semite by reference to a law 'imposed froiii without. This dependence upon an external autliority for a standard of right has no di>ubt strengthened the religious feeling. Another cause of religious fervor has been sought in the institution of polyandry which apparently prevaileil among the early Sem- ites to a greater extent than among any equally gifted race, and continued, long after another type of marriage had taken its place, to exercise its inlluence in the worship of a mother-goddess who freely gives lierself even to human lovers. A religiolis mysticism ultimately based upon such a concc|)tion of sexual relationship poured a wealth of tenderness and devotion into the worship of the supreme tribal god and remained an important factor long after the mother-god- dess cult had ceased. That the Semite possesses a capacity for intense religious faith is mani- fest ; the "name of Jesus would alone prove this. He was preceded and followed by many jirophets in Israel ; but ilohammed is the onlj' important witness to the power of the religious feeling in the home of all the Semites. The fact that monotheism was reached by Jews and Arabs, not by reasoning, but by faith in and devotion to the tribal god. is itself a testimony to the hold religion had on these people. Nevertheless, it is impossible to escape the impression that neither the consciousness of the unity of the divine life, nor the sense of mystic union with the divine, nor the devotion to a divinely or- dained mode of life, was ever so universal or so intense among the Semites as it has been in India. If the Semites are to us the people of religion par excellence it is because through the prophets of Israel, and preeminently through the founder of Christianity, a form of religion has found its way into the world which, independent of eultic performances and changing intellectual apperceptions, presents high ethical motives and ideals touched with a sense of the infinite mys- tery and sacredness of life. BiBLiOGKAPHT. Schrader, in Zeitschrift der deutschen morgenlandischen Gescllsclmft, vol. xxvii. (Leipzig, 1873) ; Chwolson, Die semitischen Volker (Berlin. 1872) ; Kremer, in Das Aitsland, vol. .xlviii. (Stuttgart, 1875): Guidi, "Delia sede primitiva dei popoli semitiei," in Accadeinia dei Lincei (Milan, 1879) ; Sprenger, Die alte Geo- graphic Arahiens (Bonn, 1875) ; Hommel. Die semifischen V Hiker uiid i<praclien (Leipzig, 18S.3) ; De Goeje, Jlet vaderland der seinietische volkcn (Leyden, 1882) : Brinton. Cradle of the Semites (Philadelphia, 181)0) ; Robertson Smith, Religion of the Semites (2d ed., London, 1894) ; id., Kinship and Marriage in Early AraKa, (Cambridge, 1885) ; Barton, A Sketch of Semitic Origins (New York, 1902). Consult also the works mentioned in the article Semitic Lan- guages. SEMITIC LANGUAGES. The current designation of a group of languages sharply markeil oil' from other groups by certain charac- teristic features pertaining both to morphology and to lexicograpliy. The name Semitic is an unfortunate one, derived from the classification of nations in the tenth chapter of Genesis. (See Semites.) In retaining it we must not only bear in mind that it is a purelj* conventional designation for a certain group of languages, but also distinguish between its ethnic and linguistic applications. It does not follow that nations speaking the same languages belong necessarily to the same stock. Confining ourselves to the linguistic applica- tion, we may distinguish two chief branches of Semitic speech — a northern and a southern. To the northern branch belong ( 1 ) the Babylono- Assyrian; (2) the Aramaic, subdivided into a western and an eastern branch (see Aramaic) ; (3) Hebra;o-Pha-nician. To the southern brancli belong (1) the Arabic, which again is divided into north and south Arabic, and (2) Ethiopic. Ill comparison with the territory throughout which the Indo-Germanic languages are spoken the area of Semitic speech is exceedingly limited. Excluding the modern Hebrew and modern Ara- bic, which have been carried by Jews and Arabs to distant parts, the Mediterranean and the Euphrates, the Indian Ocean and the Taurus range represent the western, eastern, southern, and northern boundaries for the groups of Semit- ic languages. As a direct consequence of these narrow confines, the relationship of the various Semitic languages to one another is much closer than is the ease with the various Aryan groups (e.g. Persian and Teutonic) ; it is almost jus- tifiable to call them dialects rather than sepa- rate languages. The chief traits characterizing the Semitic languages are: (1) Within the historical period of the languages, the triliteral character of most of the stems underlying lioth noun* and verbs ; (2) in the morphology, the constant character of the consonants forming the stems, the vowels being used to indicate the variations on the main theme: (3) substantial agreement in the noun and verb formation : ( 4 ) the. arrested develop- ment in the expression of time relation in the ease of the verb, which does not pass beyond the dilTerentiation between a completed and an incompleted act: (5) the use of certain conso- nants in all the langxiages (particularly h, n, sh, t ) for pronominal prefixes and suffixes and for indication of plural and feminine, as well as variations of the verbal stem corresponding in a measure to modes in Indo-Germanie languages. Other traits might be mentioned, such as the paucity of auxiliary particles, more particularly conjunctions: and it should be noted that while the Semitic languages agree closely in having the same words for common terms (such as father, mother, brother, water, food, deity, heaven, etc.), there are, however, notable exceptions (e.g. man): and in the case of verbs there is con- siderable individuality manifested in the specific meanings developed by each language from the very general one which is usually attached to a particular stem. In the form of writing employed there is even more variation, no less than three distinct spe- cies being employed in the groups comprising the Semitic languages: (a) the cuneiform char-