520 
can go back to amore ancient language than any of those that 
I have mentioned ; and, looking to it, I have no hesitation in 
answering the above question by,—‘ Certainly not.’ The form 
hwa is the more ancient; and Awaku, the common parent of 
the Indo-European, Semitic, and Egyptian forms, is a deriva- 
tive from this. We are enabled to analyze it by means of 
the bilingual tablets in the British Museum, which contain 
words and sentences in a peculiar language, with their inter- 
pretations in Assyrian. This peculiar language may be 
called Accadian—a name which can cause no ambiguity, and 
which has been suggested by Sir Henry Rawlinson, who, 
however, describes it as a Hamitic language, cognate to the 
Egyptian, which it certainly is not. It might be called with 
great propriety Chaldean, because it was used to a great ex- 
tent in the astronomical tablets, which all authorities agree 
in ascribing to the Chaldeans; only that the name Chaldean is 
unfortunately preoccupied to designate the language in which 
parts of the books of Ezra and Daniel are written, which was 
a Semitic dialect. The Accadian language was derived from 
the common parent of the Indo-European and Semitic lan- 
guages; and by comparing its forms with those of these lan- 
guages, we may recover some portions of the primitive language 
of mankind. Now the Accadian forms of the pronoun of the 
first person are mun for theindependent pronoun, or nominative, 
and mu for the affix ‘my.’ The n which is added to the 
nominative appears also in the nominative in ‘he,’ as com- 
pared with 7, the Semitic preformative, which again appears 
as the root of the Latin is, s being a case-ending, and of hic, 
i. e. hi-ce, ‘he here.’ Itis also the German er, r being a 
case-ending ; and it is our own fe. It is indeed very curious 
how like an Assyrian word sometimes is to its exact English 
equivalent. Compare, for example, i-pruch with its equi- 
valent, ‘he broke.’ The roots are cognate; as appears still 
more clearly in the verbal noun, pirich, ‘a breach;’ and the 
pronouns are all but identical. In Accadian the pronoun 
