110 PRINCIPLES OF LINGUISTIC SCIENCE. 



past, present, or future. Of wcaltli of modal forms there is but little ; distinc- 

 tions of the action of transitive, causal, intensive, iterative, reflexive, and the 

 like, by so-called conjugations, arc multiplied instead. In their nouns, the 

 Semites distinguish two genders, masculine and feminine, and throe numbers ; 

 but cases are almost wanting, only the Arabic separating nominative, genitive, 

 and accusative. The substantive verb is mostly wanting. The language is 

 poor in particles and connectives ; sentences are strung together, not interwoven 

 into a period. The characteristic stifihess is also shown in the development of 

 signification. Words applied to intellectual and moral uses remain metaphors ; 

 the figure shows through, and cannot be lost sight of. Semitic speech, then, is 

 rather pictorial, forcible, vivid, than adapted to calm and reasoning philosophy. 

 The next family of languages is one of much greater extent andvariety. It 

 covers the whole northern portion of the eastern continent, with most of Central 

 Asia, and parts of both Asia and Europe lying further south. We will call it 

 the Scythian family ; it is known also by several other names, as Ural-Altaic, 

 Tataric, Mongolian, Turanian. It is divided into five principal branches : 1. 

 The Ugrian, or Finno-IIungarian, which is chiefly European in situation, in- 

 cluding the languages of the Lapps, the Finns, and the Hungarians, with their 

 congeners in the Russian territories, on both sides of the Ural. 2. The Samoi- 

 edic, in Siberia, of small consequence. 3. The Turkish, or Tataric, spoken by 

 races avIio have played some conspicuous part in modern history, especially in 

 the dismemberment of the Mohammedan empire : its subdivisions are numerous, 

 and extend from Turkey in Europe to the lower Lena, in Northern SiTjeria. 4. 

 The Jlongoliau, the language of a people who in the 13th century overwhelmed 

 nearly all the monarchies of Europe, and established for a brief period an em- 

 pire the widest the world has ever seen : the Mongols now live in insignificance 

 under Chinese domination. 5. The Tungusic, in the extreme east, having for 

 its principal branch the Manchu, spoken by the present ruling dynasty and 

 tribe in China. 



The Scythian races have played but a subordinate part in human affairs. 

 War and devastation have been their chief trade : they have shown no aptitude 

 for advancing civilization, and but little for appropriating it. No written mon- 

 uments of their languages carry us back to a past at all remote. But it is 

 claimed of late by students of the Assyrian and Babylonian inscriptions, that 

 one of their languages is a Scythian dialect, of the Einno-Huugarian bi'anch, 

 and even that those who spoke it were the founders of the civilization of that 

 region. If this is established as true, it will greatly modify the aspect of an- 

 cient ethnological history. 



The linguistic tie M'hich binds together the branches of this great family is 

 but a weak one, much less unequivocal than in the other families we have noted. 

 There is less correspondence between them in linguistic material and forms ; 

 either their separation is very remote, or they have had a peculiarly mobile and 

 alterable structure. Their chief resemblances are of morphological character ; 

 they are all alike "agglutinative;" the combinations by which their words are 

 formed are of a loose nature ; the root or theme is held apart from the suffixes, 

 and these from one another, with a distinctive consciousness of their separate 

 individuality. All formative elements follow the root to which they are attached ; 

 prefixes are unused ; the root, which is monosyllabic, remaining pure and un- 

 changed, whatever accretions it may receive. It, however, usually affects the 

 suffixes, in a manner which constitutes one of the striking phonetic peculiarities 

 of the family. The vowels are divided into two classes, heavy and light, and 

 only vowels of the same class are allowed to occur Avithin the limits of the same 

 word ; hence, the vowels of all suffixes are assimilated to that of the root. Thus, 

 in Turkish, from hlihu comes haba-lar-um-dan, "from our fiithers ;" while from 

 dedeh comes dede-ler-in-den, " from their grandfathers." This is usually called 



