﻿ON THE ARABS. r 



ture is due to Golius, whose works are equally pro- 

 found and elegant ; so perspicuous in method, that 

 they may always be consulted without fatigue, and 

 read without languor, yet so abundant in matter, that 

 any man who shall begin with his noble edition of 

 the Grammar compiled by his mas^r Erpenhis, and 

 proceed with the help of his incomparable dictionary, 

 to ftudy his Hiiloryof Taimurby Ibm Arab <shah , and 

 shall make himself complete matter of that sublime 

 work, will understand the learned Arabic better than 

 the deepest scholar at Constantinople or at Mecca. 

 The Arabic language, therefore, is almoit wholly in 

 our power; and, as it is unqueftionably one of the 

 moft ancient in the world, so it yields to none ever 

 spoken by mortals in the number of its words and the 

 precision of its phrases; but it is equally true and 

 wonderful, that it bears not the least resemblance, 

 either in words or the structure of them, to the San- 

 scrit, or great parent of the Indian dialects ; of which 

 dissimilarity I shall mention two remarkable instan- 

 ces: the Sanscrit, like the Greek, Persian, and Ger- 

 man, delights in compounds, but in a much higher 

 degree, and indeed to such an excess, that I could 

 produce words of more than twenty syllables, not 

 formed ludicrously, like that by which the buffoon 

 in Aristophanes describes a feast, but with perfect seri- 

 ousness, on the most solemn occasions, and in the most 

 elegant works ; while the Arabic, on the other hand, 

 and all its sister dialects, ahhor the composition of 

 words, and invariably express very complex ideas 

 by circumlocution ; so that if a compound word be 

 found in any genuine language of the Arabian pen- 

 insula (znunerJ.ah for instance, which occurs in the 

 Hamasah) it may at once be pronounced an exotic. 

 Again : Tt is the genius of the Sanscrit, and 

 other languages of the same stock, that the roots of 

 verbs be almost universally biliteral, so t\\^x.five-and- 

 tvjenty hundred such roots might be formed by the 

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