ON THE COMPARISON OF ASIATIC LANGUAGES. 237 
Out of this total it seems difficult in half the cases to suppose 
that we have to deal with loan words, because the terms are 
those belonging to very common objects or actions, and in 
many cases found also in Aryan and Mongolic speech. In 
about 80 cases they are bisyllabic words, agreeing in all the 
consonants with the Semitic. It is no doubt the case that 
when a Semitic population settled in the Delta, under the 
Shepherd Kings, a great many foreign words were added to 
the Egyptian vocabulary. Thus we have the Semitic rasau, 
“head,” side by side with the old Egyptian word ta, for “head,” 
and numerous nouns, such as the words for horse, chariot, 
iron, gold, well, enclosure, town, village, pool, chief, lord, 
noble, officer, acacia, honey, vineyard, tamarisk, cypress, 
unguent, butter, oil, pillar, wall, valley, river, bank, clay, son, 
daughter, and even for stick and salutation, appear to have 
been borrowed; while other terms seem to indicate possible 
borrowings from some people akin to the Akkadians. But 
there is another class of words—mainly verbs—which it is 
more difficult to suppose could have been so borrowed, and 
which connect the Semitic and Egyptian languages more 
closely than other Asiatic tongues. 
Such are the words for think, hear, bind, envelop, embrace, 
walk, defend, lament, blow, pant, travel, kneel, work, avenge, 
understand, extend, glow, kindle, pull, shut, wall up, 
undress, and wander, also the nouns for water, lightning, 
finger, lip, and the words for hole, grief, aud nakedness ; one 
would scarcely expect such words to be borrowed unless the 
population was mainly Semitic, in which case the structure 
of the Egyptian language would have been no longer 
agelutinative. In some cases such nouns run into other 
languages as well, such as arn, “a horn,” which is Aryan 
as well as Semitic and Egyptian, or au, a “shore,” which 
appears to be the Mongol Yau, and also occurs in Hebrew as 
au or ai. 
The names of colours are very various in different lan- 
guages, though their derivation is generally to be accounted 
for in the same way. Thus red is the colour of blood or of 
flame, white is the colour of light, black the colour of what is 
burnt, blue the colour of the sky, and yellow of the sun, 
while green and purple are little distinguished till laeees 
Now, it is remarkable that the Egyptian and Semitic lan- 
guages have in common words for white, black, and red, and 
that the Egyptian language also shows the derivation of 
these colour names from words meaning * light,” * burning,” 
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