284 THE COPTIC ELEMENT IN 



Shemitic languages and tlie Indo-European ones. They are two 

 distinct and absolutely separate creations." An able writer in tbe 

 British and Foreign Evangelical Review lias shown, with some recent 

 German philologists, that the grammatical differences here spoken of 

 are greatly exaggerated. He proves that the mechanism of the 

 Semitic verbs has so many points of similarity with that of the 

 same parts of Aryan speech as to fail to constitute a fundamental 

 difference between the two systems; that in the Celtic bi'anch of the 

 Indo-European family nouns are construed together as in the Semitic 

 languages; and that there is a correspondence between the modes of 

 inflection, internal and external to the root, in both groups which 

 cannot be accidental.* It is important to notice the Celtic element 

 which the Reviewer introduces, inasmuch as it has been generally over- 

 looked in comparisons of the Aryan with the Semitic languages. 

 The custom with philologists like M. Kenan has been to compare 

 typical or extreme representatives of each class, in order to justify 

 their conclusion ; thus the Hebrew and the Sanskrit have taken places 

 which it would better have served the interests of truth to have given 

 to the Punic or the Coptic and the Celtic tongues. Mr. Taylor pro- 

 fesses, even from a comparison of the Hebrew and Greek and Latin 

 languages, partly through the medium of the Gaelic, to be satisfied of 

 the truth of the position "that, at the time when the Aryan and 

 Shemitic linguistic families parted company, they were not only fur- 

 nished with a good vocabulary of radical words, but possessed in germ, 

 and in much more than infantile development, almost all the gram- 

 matical methods which are now so divided between them as to have 

 led some philologists to describe the systems as entirely separate 

 creations." 



Passing from form to matter, from grammar to vocabulary, from 

 inflections to roots, we find the Indo-European and Semitic families 

 drawn still closer together. Professor Max Miiller says, "the com- 

 parisons that have been instituted between the Semitic roots reduced 

 to their simplest form, and the roots of the Aryan languages, have 

 made it more than probable that the material elements with which 

 they both started were originally the same."^ Even Renan is con- 

 strained to admit "that the two families possess a considerable num- 



* The Variation of Languages and Species, by the Rev. WiUiam Taylor; British ani Foreign 

 Mvangelical Review ; No. Ixxviii ; October, 1871. 

 6 Lectures on the Science of Language ; series 1, lecture viii. 



