THE LATIN VERB JUBERE. 351 



answer that it was just as easy as for us to understand the 

 difference between — " the bell was tolled, he was told to go away, 

 a crew of eighty men, all told;" or for a Hebrew, reading his Bible 

 without points, to know which of its six meanings the word dbr 

 has, when he sees it. And yet I do not assert that all these words 

 gam are distinct and separate roots; by figurative applications of 

 their first meaning they group themselves together; thus 12 and 13 

 are the same word ; so are 3, 4, 5, 6, 11 ; so also 7 and 8, and 

 probably 2 and 10. Our word gam, "to speak," seems to stand 

 alone, but nevertheless it has kindred all over the world ; one 

 kinsman is often in the mouths of the blacks of Equatorial Africa, 

 for they say, mi kam-ba, "I speak," gamba " speak." In New 

 South Wales also, the aboriginals of the Illawarra district say 

 kam-ung, " to speak." Here we have proof of the unity of lan- 

 guage, and hence, of the unity of mankind ; for the root gam 

 means "to speak" in the Hamite tongues as well as in the Shemite 

 and the Aryan. An objector will say that it is a mere coincidence 

 that gam should mean " speak " among the Hamite tribes of 

 Africa and Australia. But any mathematician here present can 

 speedily tell, by the use of his algebraical formulae, how little pro- 

 bability there is that any three letters of the alphabet, even 

 although it be reduced to eighteen or sixteen letters, should 

 arrange themselves by mere chance into the form gam, "to 

 speak." For this and many other reasons I believe in the kinship 

 of languages. 



VII. I now proceed to consider the root and cognates of the 

 Latin verb jubere. In the conjugation and declension of the I.-K. 

 verb under consideration, four forms are used, viz. : — abair, 

 dubhair, their, and radh, as, an abair mi, shall I say'? cha 

 dubhairt mi, I said not; thubairt mi, I said; ma their mi, if I 

 shall say ; ag radh, saying (literally, " at-saying," " a-saying," like 

 E. a-going). This variety of form shows it to be a very old and a 

 very common verb ; for the same variety occurs in the S. verb 

 bru, "to speak," (which is assisted in its congregation by vach 

 and ah) and in the substantive verb "to be" everywhere. I 

 have already explained that the simple root form of this K. verb 

 is dabair or dubair, and for the sake of comparison I now bring 

 in the H. verb "to speak," which is da bar or am a r. This I do 

 not because the Hebrew had any share in forming the Keltic or 

 the Latin language, but because Hebrew is a very ancient 

 language, and any words which are found both in it and in the 

 Aryan must belong to the earliest forms of human speech. Root 

 words have also preserved in Hebrew many of the figurative 

 shades of meaning which enable a philologist to show the connection 

 of their derived words in other languages. And the H. verb, 

 dabar, "to speak," is so like the K. conjugational form dhubair 



