TWENTY-THIRD ORDINARY MEETING. 285 
petiod of their Empire, the sallow tint and refined type of the 
Semitic families of mankind.” (Egypt from Earliest Times, page 9). 
This double element visible in the race is evident in their language 
also. The essence of the language, its blood and marrow, is Semitic, 
while its form or structure is to some extent Turanian. 
Bunsen says (Vol. V., Egypt’s Place in History, p. 87): ‘The 
Egyptian roots find their organic development in both the Semitic 
and Aryan system of languages; the Egyptian grammatical forms 
also contain germs afterwards developed sometimes as Semitic, some- 
times as Aryan forms, sometimes as both.” 
The Egyptian is an agglutinate, monosyllabic language, expressing 
‘the persons of the verb and the declensions of the substantives by 
pronominal forms and prepositions glued to the verbal root and to 
the substantive. 
Let us take the auxiliary verb au, “ to be,” as an example of the 
agglutinate form of the Egyptian : 
SING. Lede, 
aua Tam aunu we are 
auek 
thou art au-ten y 
ne you are 
auf he is au-sen they are 
aus she is 
The root is au, and the final vowel sounds and syllables are con- 
tractions of the personal pronouns appended to the root. By a com- 
parison of this verb with the Syriac or Northern Semitic form, we 
can see that the fundamental root and the structural form is the 
same in both : 
SING. EDs 
Hit I was Haun we were 
Haut thou wert Hautun } masc. 
Hou he was Hauten f ie Nene earn 
Hout she was Hau they were 
The Egyptian and Syriac roots are evidently here from the same 
source, and if the hieroglyphic or picture form be the most ancient, 
the Egyptian will be nearer to that original, and while the Syriac 
and other Semitic forms show they are descendants from that original, 
yet their modifications are greater. The difference between these 
two forms is not greater than might be expected from different 
branches of the same race, isolated for centuries and living under 
different social and physical conditions. In Egyptian the root is aw, 
ll 
