The Oceanic Languages Shemitic : a Discovery. 263 



Remark 1. It seems that many, perhaps all, of these are 

 in use in the My., but not observed or noticed. They being 

 epenthetic, or always coming after the verb, have at last 

 been written as if part of the verb root. This is very 

 interesting, as throwing light, as will be seen, upon a some- 

 what obscure problem of Sh. philology, the tri-consonantal 

 form of a large part of the Sh. vocabulary. Thus, take the 

 common Ef. words minu, to drink ; rongo, to hear ; tv.ru, to 

 descend ; tangi, to wail. These in the My. are given as 

 minum, dangar, turun, tangis, in which the final m, r, n, 

 s, are the demonstratives epenthetically used, as above shown, 

 but exhibited as a part of the root. There are examples 

 in Ef. of the same tiling. If I mistake not, it will be 

 found that the third consonant of many of the Shem. 

 stems has a similar origin — e.g., the f in Heb., gadai, 

 properly like the " Arb., to cut off;' 5 Ef, kotef, whose final f 

 is the Sh., fa of §1 : the real stem is biliteral, or mono- 

 syllabic ; Ef., kot, kut. Heb., gad, gud, &c. (vide Vocabulary, 

 71-3, 76-7 ; vide Ges. Heb. Gr., §30, 2.) This, if correct, 

 would partly explain the tri-consonantal, or dissyllabic 

 mystery. When the third consonant is prefixed, as Syr. 

 Tiakas (Ges., I.e.), it probably is an auxiliary verb. But this 

 by the way. 



2. The so-called numeral and case inflexions have already 

 been noticed. The inflexion of gender has also to be noticed 

 now, as connected with the pronouns. In Ef. we have traces 

 of it, thus — 



Ma, a mas. demonst., used only before the names of 

 males ; it is the same m which forms in Heb. the mas. 

 plural of nouns and pronouns. 



Li, lai, similarly used before the names of females is the 

 demonst. la, with i suffixed to make it fern. The very same i 

 is similarly suffixed to pronouns in all the Sh. languages. 



Tete (te), a pronoun used only in addressing females, is 

 the same t as is used to form the Heb. fern, plural of nouns. 

 It is a fern, demonst. in Arb. It appears as v. p., third person 

 singular, fern., generally in all the Shemitic languages. Heb. 

 t (th) is a fern, termination in the demonst. zath, and in 

 some fern, nouns sing. 



§7. The noun. In Efatese the number of nouns is denoted 

 by plural demonstratives ; so, for the most part, in the Sh.; 

 but in the Sh. these plural pronouns are suffixed, whereas 

 in Oc. they are usually found separate, though sometimes 



