THE OCEANIC FAMILY OF LANGUAGES, 817 
grammatical or syntactical processes or sounds, which constitutes 
them one family. In order to ascertain the origin of this family, 
or its relationship to some other known family, as the Indo- 
European or the Semitic, these all must be taken into account, 
due regard being had to the principles of dialectic, phonetic, and 
grammatical variation, such as obtains in languages in the 
analytic stage, and due allowance being made for the length of 
time, and the circumstances in which the analytic process has been 
going on—in this case (say) four thousand years—in circumstances 
very highly favourable to diversification. If it can be shown that 
the common stock of numerals, pronouns, and other fundamental 
words, of formative suffixes and prefixes, and of grammatical 
processes and words, which constitutes the Oceanic languages a 
perfectly well-defined family, is Semitic, this will establish the 
relationship of these languages to the Semitic languages, and 
prove that the Oceanic mother-tongue was a sister-tongue to the 
Arabic, Phenician, Hebrew, Syriac, Assyrian, Himys aritic, and 
Ethiopic (with aineee aiidenri dialects, as the Neo- -Syriac, Mahri, 
Amharic, and Tigre), sprung, like them, from the no longer 
existing Semitic mother-tongue. The object of this paper is to 
show as briefly as possible that this can be done. 
In treating the phonology of our subject, it is necessary to 
observe that the Semitic languages have certain gutturals peculiar 
to them, and that some of these occur—e.g., in the numeral words— 
for 1, 4, 5, 7, 10, and 1,000. The Semitic gutturals referred 
to are alif represented in what follows by a or some other vowel 
in italic, and when it has hemza, which indicates that it is to be 
pronounced almost like i‘ (ain), by a‘ or other vowel with ‘; ha 
by 2; hha by h’; the rougher Arabic hha by h” ; ain by hé ; the 
rougher Arabic ghain by h‘. As to their original pronounciation,* 
@ was the lightest, softer than h which is represented by our h. 
The guttural h’ is stronger than h, something like ch in Scotch 
loch ; it had a softer and rougher sound, the latter being repre- 
sented in Arabic by h”. The guttural 2‘ is unpronounceable by 
Europeans, and peculiar to the Semitic languages, akin to and 
sometimes confounded with h”. It hada softer and a rougher 
sound, the latter being represented in Arabic by “‘, and described 
as the sound of a g slightly rattled in the throat, and resembling 
somewhat the Northumbrian r and the French r grasséyé. To 
these has to be added the Semitic 7, which was sometimes pro- 
nounced as a lingual, and sometimes as a guttural with a hoarse 
guttural sound. For an account of these gutturals, and the 
trills 7, 7, see Prof. M. Miiller’s Lectures on the Science of 
Language, ii, pp. 135-138. It has to be added that the tendency 
*The symbols here used are not to be regarded as at all denoting the true pronounciation ; 
as to that, in the ancient and modern Semitic dialects the grammars of the various dialect 
must be consulted. 
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