1S60.] Is the Pushto a Semitic Language ? 335 



By " original tenses," Captain Eaverty means those that are not 

 formed with the auxiliary to be. If we consult his grammar for 

 further light on this suhject, we shall find him giving page after 

 page, not two, but four such " original tenses." He calls these, 

 present, aorist, imperfect, and past. On further examination, we shall 

 find that what he calls the aorist, is no tense at all, as is proved by 

 the very quotations that he constantly gives, but is the subjunctive 

 mood. Then we are struck by the fact that the past of regular verbs 

 differs from the imperfect only by an augment. We have then the 

 clue to the grammarian's statement. His two " original" tenses are 

 the present and the past imperfect tenses which the Semitic lan- 

 guages have not at all. But a candid comparison would at once 

 have shown that those languages which have these only as simple 

 tenses, such as Parsi, Persian, Russian, Polish, Swedish, Danish, 

 German, English, and others, are all Arian languages. 



Compare these two tenses in Pushto : tuaJi-am, loali-alam, (=Latin 

 caedo, caedebar,) with the corresponding ones in Polish, for instance : 

 gr-am, gr-alem. They differ in meaning in this, that the past tense of 

 the Polish is active, and that of the Pushto has a passive sense. How 

 thoroughly the latter is characteristic of the Sanskrit and many other 

 Indian languages, few readers of the Journal will need to have pointed 

 out to them. It is curious that the European languages, even the 

 ancient ones, seem to have lost this preference of the passive construction 

 in the past tenses to the active, though it may still very distinctly be 

 traced, in Latin, in the favourite gerundive construction, in the form 

 in which the ablative absolute most frequently appears, and in the 

 peculiar conception that must exist in the mind of the speaker or 

 writer who can form a passive voice of verbs like " to go" and 

 " to come." 



Such astonishing confusion having been introduced into what is 

 really a very simple question, it is worth while to inquire what are 

 the essential features that distinguish the Semitic from the Arian 

 stock of languages. Contradiction need not be feared, if they are 

 stated to be the following : — 



1. The Semitic languages, in historical times, consist of triliteral 

 and hence polysyllabic roots, the three letters being all consonants. 



2. The roots express the ideas, whilst relations are denoted by an 



