Brinlon.] ^lO [Oct. 18, 



The ancient Libyan or Numidian was the parent stem of these 

 dialects. Some hundreds of inscriptions in it have been preserved, 

 a few of them bilingual, so there is a possibility that we may 

 recover the grammar of this now lost tongue.* Prof. Newman, 

 indeed, has made an effort to restore it from modern Berber dia- 

 lects ;f but I am surprised that he has made no use of this valuable 

 epigraphy. 



These various Libyan dialects form the western branch of a 

 large family of tongues, of which the eastern branches include the 

 modern and ancient Coptic, the Abyssinian and others. The 

 whole family has been called Hamitic, or Cushite, or Proto-Semitic, 

 of which terms the first is the best, simply because it conveys no 

 preconceived hypothesis. The grammar of all the Hamitic lan- 

 guages shows similar traits. The nouns have a masculine and femi- 

 nine form ; the radical may be of one or more syllables and, unlike 

 the Semitic tongues, it remains unaltered in the process of 

 word-building ; there are plural but not dual forms ; relation is 

 expressed by both prefixes and suffixes ; and the verb originally 

 had but one form, instead of the two or more found in the Semitic 

 languages. J 



The general grammatic aspect of these languages, however, leaves 

 no doubt but that at some remote epoch they were derived from 

 the same original form of speech from which the Semitic languages 

 trace their descent ; hence, they are classified as the Hamito-Semi- 

 tic stock. 



Where was the original seat of the tribe who spoke this parent 

 tongue has not been ascertained. The uniform opinion of scholars 

 has been that it was somewhere in Western Asia ; and though 

 the question does not immediately concern the present discus- 

 sion, I cannot forbear adding that I hold this to be a mistake, and 

 that the original seat of the Semites was on or near the Atlantic 

 coast. 



It is with the Libyan branch of the Hamitic family of languages 

 that I shall proceed to compare the ancient Etruscan. 



* They have been edited by General Faidherbe, Prof. Haldvy, Renan and others. 



t Libyan Vocabulary : an Essay toward reproducing the Ancient Numidian Language. Lon- 

 don, 1882. 



I These are substantially the characteristics of the family as traced by Friedrich Mai- 

 ler in his Grundriss der Sprachwissenschaft, and by Hovelacque in his work, La Unguis- 

 lique. 



