88 SEMITIC LANGUAGE 



superiority of one of these regions as the centre of distribution in 

 prehistoric times. 



It has been urged, also, that the people whose language exhibits 

 the earliest forms must have occupied the original seat of the race. 

 This consideration has been adduced in favor of Arabia as the Semitic 

 home, the Arabic language having preserved in general the earliest 

 Semitic forms, but this consideration is by no means conclusive. The 

 preservation or loss of early forms is a matter of wear and tear. A 

 people occupying the original seat may have had such social relations 

 as tended to degrade grammatical forms; and, on the other hand, 

 a community wandering from the original home may have remained 

 so secluded as to preserve to a great degree the earliest forms of its 

 language. To this it may be added that no one of the Semitic 

 languages has in all cases preserved the earliest grammatical forms; 

 but the formal degradation has been produced by conditions which 

 we are not able to fix with certainty. In any case it may be said 

 that the loss of grammatical forms in the Babylonian- Assyrian could 

 by no means of itself demonstrate that this language was not spoken 

 in the original seat of the Semitic race. 



The argument from vocabulary has been stoutly pressed. If, it is 

 said, we can recover the vocabulary of the primitive language, its 

 contents, and especially the names of natural objects, will indicate 

 the region in which the language arose. This argument has been 

 urged especially in behalf of Babylonia as the Semitic home. It is 

 found that the Semitic dialects have the same words for certain 

 objects, as the vine, sheep, goat, camel, gold, copper, winter, summer, 

 heaven, river, canal, sea, and bitumen-brick, and this list appears to 

 point to Babylonia. Yet this argument also is not conclusive. The 

 Babylonian term for a movable object, as, for example, a metal, may 

 be an importation, and so to some extent words for plants and do- 

 mestic animals; animals might easily pass from one region to another, 

 a<?, for example, the horse was imported into Egypt. Further, when 

 two dialects agree in a word, one may have borrowed it from the 

 other; or one, having borrowed it from a foreign source, may have 

 transmitted it to others. Moreover, one may have changed its 

 home once or oftener, and its vocabulary may have been affected by 

 its various places of abode; all that can be said for any one region to 

 which the vocabulary points is that it has in some regards affected 

 the language, and such influence indicates a residence of the people 

 there at some time. Further, so far as regards the words mentioned 

 above as apparently pointing to Babylonia, some of them are names 

 of objects (as domestic animals, winter, summer, heaven) which 

 cannot be regarded as peculiar to any one place. 



None of these arguments, then, can be regarded as conclusive, 

 nor has additional evidence been adduced along these lines. Recently, 



