234 Comparative Philology, de. | April, 
original tongue consisting of a very limited vocabulary, and few or 
no grammatical inflexions. 
What an immense number of ages must have revolved in their 
ceaseless progress in order to develop this mere skeleton into such a 
fine body of language as we have evidence that Sanskrit on the one 
hand, and Hebrew or Arabic on the other, had assumed more than 
three thousand years ago. It is a fact capable of demonstration, 
that in this remote period there existed as much dissimilarity 
between the two families as at the present time, both as to their 
vocabulary and grammar ; that is, there was no closer resemblance 
between Hebrew and Sanskrit than there is between Arabic and 
Greek at this day, after the lapse of three or four thousand years. 
Nevertheless, the mutations in all these languages have been exceed- 
ingly slow; Arabic, for instance, having scarcely yet arrived at that 
state of analytic decay at which Hebrew had arrived in the days of 
Moses ; and yet when Hebrew was a living language it sustained 
scarcely a dialectical change during the period of a thousand years ; 
and when we consider that Sanskrit and Hebrew must have gradu- 
ally developed themselves from mere roots into the magnificent 
trees to which they may fitly be compared, and that thousands of 
years have been insufficient to produce any radical change in them, 
what an incalculable number of ages must have elapsed since they 
first began to grow, gradually advancing to synthetic maturity, and 
then as gradually decaying in structure, till we find their living 
representatives as Greek and Arabic, although much changed, still 
retaining all the more remarkable characteristics of their cognate 
tongues. 
There is no reason why I should confine myself to Hebrew and 
Sanskrit for illustration, except for the sake of brevity, for the same 
phenomena are observable in Greek and other languages which 
have come down to our own times. Indeed, it is well known that 
Greek has retained the great majority of its ancient words and much 
of its synthetic character to this day. The spoken language has of 
course assumed a more analytical form, but it has undergone so 
little radical change, that Thucydides, for instance, would find no 
difficulty in reading Tricoupe’s ‘ History of the Greek Revolution :’ 
in fact, the two authors have been compared with each other as to 
style and language. The changes, then, which Greek has expe- 
rienced have been very gradual, like those of Hebrew and Arabic, and 
the same may be predicated of many other languages. 
And now, if we should illustrate the matter by a diagram, the 
best form would be an acute angle, the extreme points of whose two 
sides are very distant, one point representing the Aryan family of lan- 
guages, and the other the Semitic; and although the extreme points 
of the two sides might be thousands of miles asunder, the angle 
itself would be something like the angle of parallax of a fixed star. 
SS a 
