AFFINITY OF LANGUAGES. 735 



before the extension of the Syrian power, that 

 the modern Parsees, who are descendants of the 

 ancient Persians, still retain the Zend and Pah- 

 lavi dialects : that according to an old poet of 

 Sidon, the founder of Babylon was a Phoeni- 

 cian and that the same astronomical formula 

 were employed in Chaldea as in Egypt. (Id. 

 pp. 450, 469.) 



Sir Edward Bui wer justly observes, that " when 

 history fails in accounting for the foreign extrac- 

 tion of any people, or when it is manifestly mis- 

 taken, the question must be determined by the 

 analogy of languages, which is at once conclusive, 

 if nothing else were left." And it has been shown 

 by Godfrey Higgins, that there is not one written 

 language, in which several words of every other 

 written language may not be found: that accord- 

 ing to Van Kenedy, 900 Sanscrit words have been 

 discovered in the Persian, Greek, Latin, German, 

 and English languages 339 in the Greek ; 319 

 in the Latin ; 263 in the Persian ; 163 in the Ger- 

 man ; and 31 common to them all : that accord- 

 ing to Cluverius, nearly 1 000 Hebrew words have 

 been found in other languages: that Dr. Geddes 

 has shown nearly all the genuine Saxon words 

 to be either Hebrew, Chaldee, Arabic, or Per- 

 sian : that Sir William Drummond has traced a 

 radical affinity between the Coptic or Egyptian, 

 the Ethiopic, the Chaldee, Arabic, and Hebrew : 

 that General Valiancy has shown the ancient 

 Celtic to be a dialect of the Phoenician, which 



