TWENTY-THIRD ORDINARY MEETING. 285 



period of their Empire, the sallow tint and refined type of the 

 Semitic families of mankind." (Egypt from Earliest Times, page 9). 



This double element visible in the race is evident in their language 

 also. The essence of the language, its blood and marrow, is Semitic, 

 while its form or structure is to some extent Turanian. 



Bunsen says (Vol. Y., Egypt's Place in History, p. 87): "The 

 Egyptian roots find their organic development in both the Semitic 

 and Aryan system of languages ; the Egyptian grammatical forms 

 also contain germs afterwards developed sometimes as Semitic, some- 

 times as Aryan forms, sometimes as both." 



The Egyptian is an agghitinate, monosyllabic language, expi-essing 

 the persons of the verb and the declensions of the substantives by 

 pronominal forms and prepositions glued to the verbal root and to 

 the substantive. 



Let us take the auxiliary verb au, " to be," as an example of the 

 agglutinate form of the Egyptian : 



Sing. Pl. 



aua I am 



, > thou art 



aut ) 



auf he is 



aus she is 



The root is au, and the final vowel sounds and syllables are con- 

 tractions of the personal pronouns appended to the root. By a com- 

 parison of this verb with the Syriac or Northern Semitic form, we 

 can see that the fundamental root and the structural form is the 

 same in both : 



The Egyptian and Syriac roots are evidently here from the same 

 source, and if the hieroglyphic or picture form be the most ancient, 

 the Egyptian will be nearer to that original, and while the Syriac 

 and other Semitic forms show they ai"e descendants from that original, 

 yet their modifications are greater. The difference between these 

 two forms is not greater than might be expected from different 

 bi-anches of the same race, isolated for centuries and living under 

 different social and physical conditions. In Egyptian the root is mc, 

 11 



