The Oceanic Languages Shemitic : a Discovery. 243 



regarded as a mere crotchet. The affinity of the Malagasy 

 to the Malay was known two centuries ago ; that, also, of 

 the Polynesian to the Malay has been known since the time 

 of Captain Cook's discoveries. The common theory first 

 stated by Forster in 1778, to the effect that " all these lan- 

 guages were derived from one very ancient tongue now lost," 

 has been effectively supported by Marsden, who calls (vide 

 his Malay Grammar, " Introduction," p. xviii.) the original 

 language the Polynesian, and maintains that one of its 

 dialects stands in the same relation to the Malay as the 

 Saxon to the English. 



The relation, then, between the Shemitic and Oceanic is, 

 generally speaking, that of an ancient to a modern language, 

 as Latin to French, Saxon to English. This implies that we 

 shall find the Oceanic, as compared with the Shemitic, 

 characterised by phonetic and grammatical decay, the abbre- 

 viation and corruption of words by a principle of voice 

 economy, and the substitution of separate auxiliary words 

 or particles for the inseparable forms of declension and con- 

 jugation ; and that allowance must be made for the existence 

 of ancient vulgar dialects, in addition to the literary, just as 

 is done in tracing the Romance to the Latin. In the Shemitic 

 we find that this process of decay had been operating ; in the 

 Oceanic we find it carried further, but on the same lines. 

 Gesenius (Heb. Gr., "Introd.," sec. 16), glancing over the 

 Shemitic field, says : — " The Aramaean dialects exhibit the 

 earliest and greatest decay, and next to them the Hebrew- 

 Canaanitish. The Arabic was the longest to maintain the 

 natural fulness of its forms, being preserved undisturbed 

 among the secluded tribes of the desert until the Moham- 

 medan revolution, when it suffered considerable decay. It 

 was not till so late a period as this that the Arabic reached 

 nearly the same point at which we find the Hebrew, even as 

 early as the times of the Old Testament." " This," he adds, 

 " accounts for the facts (erroneously considered so very sur- 

 prising) that the ancient Hebrew in its grammatical structure 

 agrees more with the modern than with the ancient Arabic." It 

 is the Aramsean, with its " simplicity, occasioned, in fact, by 

 derangement of structure and curtailing of forms," that the 

 Oceanic most resembles. 



According to Latham (Gomp. Phil., ch. 66) the Shemitic 

 languages are essentially dialects of a single language from 

 which is to be inferred either the comparatively recent 



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