686 ORIENTAL SCHOLARSHIP DURING THE PRESENT CENTURY, 



difiereiitiated as Babylonian, Pbenician, Hebrew, and Arabic, go back, 

 as we are told, far. beyond tlie earliest documents of Sanskrit or Greek. 

 Here also we must admit a long period previous to tlie formation of the 

 great national languages, because thus only can the fact be accounted 

 for that on many points, so modern a language as Arabic is more primi- 

 tive thau Hebrew, while, in other grammatical formations Hebrew is more 

 primitive than Arabic* 



Whether it is possible that these two linguistic consolidations, the 

 Aryan and Semitic, came originally from a common source is a question 

 which scholars do not like to ask, because they know that it does not 

 admit of a scholar-like answer. ISTo scholar would deny the possibility 

 of an original community between the two during their radical period, 

 and i)revious to the development of any granmiatical forms. But the 

 handling of this kind of linguistic protoplasm is not congenial to the 

 student of language, and must be left to other hands. Still, such an 

 attempt should not be discouraged altogether, and if they are carried out 

 in the same spirit in which in the last number of the "-Journal of the Ger- 

 man Oriental Society,'''' Prof. Erman has tried to prove a close relation- 

 ship between Semitic and Bgyiitian, they deserve the highest credit. 

 Another question also which carries us back still further into unknown 

 anti(|uity — whether it is possible to account for the origin of languages, 

 or rather of human speech in general — is one which scholars eschew, 

 because it is one to be handled by philosophers rather than by students 

 of language, I must confess, the deeper we delve, the farther the solu- 

 tion of this problem seems to recede from our grasp; and we may here 

 too learn the old lesson that our mind was not made to grasp begin- 

 nings. We know the beginnings of nothing in this world, and the prob- 

 lem of the origin of language, which is but another name for the origin 

 of thought, evades our comprehension quite as much as the problem of 

 the origin of our planet and of the life upon it, or the origin of space 

 and time, whether without or within us. History can dig very deep, 

 but, like the shafts of our mines, it is always arrested before it has 

 reached the very lowest stratum. Students of language, and particu- 

 larly students of Oriental languages, have solved the problem of the 

 origin of species in language, and they had done so long before the days 

 of Darwin ; but like Darwin, they have to acce])t certain original germs 

 as given, and they do not venture to pierce into the deepest mysteries 

 of actual creation or cosmic beginnings. 



And yet, though accepting this limitation of their labors as the com- 

 mon fate of all human knowledge. Oriental scholars have not altogether 

 labored in vain. No history of the world can in future be written 

 without its introductory chapter on the great consolidations of the 

 ancient Aryan and Semitic speakers. That chapter may be called 

 prehistoric, but ihe facts with which it deals are thoroughly historical, 

 and I say once moie, in the eyes of the student of language, they are 



§ee Priver, H^hr^vj T^mes, p, 132. 



