THE SHELLUH LANGUAGE. 479 



existence in his time, he was a man of good general intelligence 

 who seems to have had frequent occasion to compare the two 

 languages. 



The first person who was able to speak on the subject with 

 any authority was Venture de Paradis, a man of remarkable 

 linguistic attainments, who died prematurely while accom- 

 panying the French Syrian Expedition in 1799. His grammar 

 and vocabulary of the Bereber language were not published 

 until 1844, and his conclusions were not until then made known 

 to the world. It appears that in the year 1788 two Shelluhs, 

 one a native of Haha, the other from Sous, went to Paris. 

 Notwithstanding the difficulty of communicating with men 

 who possessed no written language, Venture de Paradis con- 

 trived to obtain from them a list of SheUuh words and short 

 phrases. He was very soon after attached to a mission sent to 

 Algiers, where he was detained for more than a year. He made 

 acquaintance with two Kabyles, theological students, at Algiers, 

 and, finding that his list of Sbelluh words corresponded very 

 nearly with the Kabyle equivalents, he devoted himself to the 

 study of the Kabyle dialect of the Bereber tongue, and pre- 

 pared the grammar and dictionary which remained for more 

 than half a century unpublished. It might be sufficient to 

 refer the reader to the judgment of so competent an authority; 

 but a slight examination of the subject has aiforded such con- 

 firmation to the conclusions of Venture de Paradis as seems to 

 place them beyond the reach of controversy. 



It must be remarked in the first place that, from the want 

 of sacred books or other written records among the races of 

 the Bereber stock, there is no one of the many dialects spoken by 

 them that can be taken as the classical standard to which others 

 may be compared. French writers in treating of what they 

 style ' la langue Berbfere ' usually mean the Kabyle, spoken by 

 most of the mountain tribes of Algeria. The same language, 

 with dialectic difierences, is used by many tribes of the Sahara ; 

 but throughout the larger part of the vast region lying between 

 the southern borders of Algeria and Marocco and the Soudan, 

 the prevailing tongue, though unquestionably belonging to the 

 Bereber family, deserves to rank as a distinct language from 

 the Kabyle. A slight examination of the latter shows that it 

 has been largely adulterated by contact with the Arab popida- 



