1866.] Proceedings of the Asiatic Society. 209 



need not lay a particular stress on the final n in amen and the n of the 

 original form of the Sanskrit om.* (Proceedings for 1865, p. 48.) In 

 his remarks on Mr. Beames's paper, he has, however, so far changed his 

 opinion as to state that he agreed with Mr. Beames in thinking that 

 " there is no connection between Amen and Orn as proposed" by me. 

 (Proceedings for 1866, p. 195.) 



"Mr. Beames's arguments against me are based on the etymology and 

 the meaning of the word Amen, which, he says, are not what I assumed 

 them to be ; and if so, my conclusion must be wrong. According to 

 him, the original Semitic biliteral root man with a prosthetic a forms 

 amen, and as that is very different from the Sanskrit av of Oman, the 

 two cannot be said to have come from the same root. This would no 

 doubt have .been a strong argument, had the derivation given by Mr. 

 Beames been not open to question. Such is, however, not the case. 

 The original of amen, says Dr. Johnson " has given rise to many 

 conjectures," and even at the last meeting, two such distinguished 

 scholars, as Messrs. Beames and Blochmann, were diametrically 

 opposed to each other, one maintaining am, and the other man to be 

 the original root. The Rev. J. Wenger, the most learned Hebrew 

 scholar in Calcutta, and the Rev. Professor K. M. Banerjea wrote to 

 me, when I consulted them in 1865, that Am was the root of Amen. 

 Scaliger assigned to it an Arabic origin, and took er-*! to be its 

 radical. But the great body of Biblical commentators and lexicogra- 

 phers give the Hebrew }DN as the root of the Greek afx-qv, and 

 consequently of the English A men. Kitto, in his Cyclopsedia of 

 Biblical Literature, and Calmet, in the Dictionary of the Bible, are 

 positive on the subject. None of them has attempted to go beyond 

 the triliteral root. Anxious as I am to avoid confounding accidental 

 phonetic similitude with radical connexion proved by strict grammatical 

 analysis, I must observe that as regards Amen, everything beyond its 

 triliteral root appears dark and undefined, — certainly not in a condition 

 to justify any positive deduction. Under the circumstances, the question 

 at issue must be decided by other than grammatical evidence. So 

 far as mere sound is concerned, seeing on the one hand, that the triliteral 

 root aman is as old as the Pentateuch, which, according to Mr. Beames, 

 dates from at least 1200 B. C, and that a great many Semitic roots are 



