A PRIMEVAL MOTHER TONGUE 



with the Semitic race and its neighbours, so 

 thoroughly have our notions been remodelled. 



Old-fashioned speculations concerning the 

 primitive unity of human speech have similarly 

 ifallen into discredit. Previous to the detection 

 of the kinship between the various forms of 

 Aryan speech, no end of books were written to 

 prove that all known languages were in some way 

 descended from Hebrew ; not that there was any 

 warrant for such an opinion, either in Scripture 

 or in the general probabilities of the case, but 

 that the preeminence of Hebrew as the lan- 

 guage of Jehovah's chosen people and the ve- 

 hicle of divine revelation created a speculative 

 need for proving it to be the original uncor- 

 rupted dialect of mankind. Since the establish- 

 ment of the Aryan family of languages, it has 

 still been felt necessary to prove that all existing 

 varieties of speech have had a common origin, 

 and as a step toward this end great learning and 

 ingenuity have been expended in the attempt 

 to detect some primordial similarity between the 

 Semitic languages and languages of Aryan de- 

 scent. 



It is not too much to say that all this learning 

 and ingenuity have been utterly wasted. Apart 

 from a few casual coincidences, as in the He- 

 brew and Sanskrit words for six, there is not a 

 trace of similarity between the Semitic and the 

 Aryan vocabularies ; while as regards both in- 

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