1865.] Proceedings of the Asiatic Society. 47 



verily, I say unto you.' The Arabic language lias the same word, and it 

 occurs in the different forms of Amin, dmdnet, Imdn, &c The Rev. J. 

 Wenger and Professor K. M. Banerjea inform me that one meaning of 

 A' man is ' to nourish,' which is the same as that of the Sanskrit root ah. 

 There is also a Hebrew root of the sound of ab, meaning ' to protect' 

 or ' generate,' which gives the word abba l father.' There is likewise 

 an am meaning ' mother.' But I am not sufficiently conversant with the 

 Hebrew language to be able to say whether either of these or some 

 'other allied root forms the basis of A' man. Judging from the fact of 

 the most ancient roots of the Hebrew being biliteral, I am induced to 

 believe that originally the root of A' men, whatever it was, was a biliteral 

 one. It thence follows that the two words Om and Amen were at one 

 time not only alike in meaning and very nearly in sound, but they 

 originated from roots of the same character and meaning. Fur- 

 ther, both the Hebrews and the Hindus attach a mysterious importance 

 to their respective A' men and Om, and use them in reference to the 

 Godhead and in connexion with their religions. The force of these 

 facts combined leads me to the conclusion that the two are the same 

 or dialectic varieties of the same word, which the Hindus and the 

 Hebrews either had in common before they separated into the two 

 races, or which one of them borrowed from the other. I am of opinion 

 that the modern Bengali hurt, for ' yes' is a Cockneyism of Om produced 

 by an aspiration of the initial vowel, but whether so or not, certain it 

 Is that the mystic particle hum of Om mani padma hum of the 

 Tibetans owes its origin to a local change of that kind." 



"With reference to the above, Mr. Blochmann made the following 

 observations. 



" I think that in the Hebrew word amen, the first syllable am is the 

 real root and the final n the modifying letter. The letter n is often 

 used in Shemitic languages as an accessory consonant. 



" The syllable am ff seems to be a softened form for ham *£, between 

 which two roots we have the intermediate form **. The k sound in 

 the beginning of words is often softened or even thrown off altogether 

 as in Clodewig and Ludovicus, the English ' like' and the German 

 1 gleich.' Now the combination of h and m would appear to mean 

 originally ' to collect,' ' to heap up,' cf. a/*,a together, the Latin 

 cum, cumulus a heap, &c. From the idea of heaping up we get the 

 ideas — 



