ARTIFICIAI OR ARTICULATE LANGUAGE. 



271 



the last country never using- it, however, but with a personal pronoun pre- 

 fixed ; and it is the very same term in Germany, Holland, and the contiguous 

 countries ; the s being dropped in consequence of the h being aspirated more 

 harshly : whence the Hebrew s-her is converted into her, used also com- 

 monly, as the similar term is in France, with the prefix o{ a personal pronoun. 



The radical idea of the word man is that of a thinking or reasonable being, 

 in contradistinction to the whole range of the irrational creation, by which 

 the thinking being is surrounded. And here again I may boldly assert, that 

 while in the primary sense of the word we have the most positive proof of 

 the quarter of the globe from which it issued, and where mankind must first 

 have existed, and from which he must have branched out into every other 

 quarter, there is not a language to be met with, ancient or modern, insular or 

 continental, civilized or savage, in use among blacks or whites, in which the 

 same term, under som.e modification or other, is not to be traced, and in which 

 it does not present the same general idea. 



Man, in Hebrew, to which the term is possibly indebted for its earliest 

 origin, occurs under the form njo {maneh), a verb directly importing " to dis- 

 cern or discriminate and which, hence, signifies, as a noun, " a discerning 

 or discriminating being." In Sanscrit we have both these senses in the 

 directest manner possible ; for in this very ancient tongue, man is the verb, 

 and can only be rendered " to think or reason ;" while the substantive is 

 mana, of precisely the same meaning as our own word man ; and necessarily 

 importing, as I have already observed, " a thinking or reasonable creature." 

 Hence Menu, in both Sanscrit and ancient Egyptian, is synonymous with 

 Adam, or the first man, emphatically the man; hence, again, Menes, was the 

 first king of Egypt; and Minos, the first or chief judge, discerner, or arbi- 

 trator among the Greeks. Hence, also, in Greek, men and menos (mev and AfCfo?) 

 signify mind, or, "the thinking faculty;" but i^^vos, contracted, is ?news, which, 

 in the Latin language, imports the very same thing. In the Gothic, and all 

 the northern dialects of Europe, man imports the very same idea as in our 

 own tongue ; the English, indeed, having descended from the same quarter. 

 In Bengalee and Hindoostanee, it is manshu ; in Malayan, manizu ; in Japa- 

 nese, mam'o; in Atooi, and the Sandwich Islands generally, towe, tonato, or 

 tangi ; while manawe, imports the mi?id or spirit; and in New-Guinea, or 

 Papuan, it is sonaman, a compound evidently pronounced from man. In this 

 utmost extremity, this Ultima Thule of the southern world, I will just observe, 

 also, in passing, that we meet with the terms Sytan for Satan, or the Source 

 of Evil ; and Wcith (Germ. Goth) for God. 



But it may, perhaps, be observed, that in all the southern dialects of Europe, 

 the French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese, we meet with no such term as 

 man; nor in the Latin, from which all these are derived, in which last lan- 

 guage the term for man is homo. Yet nothing is easier than to prove, that 

 even homo itself, the source of all these secondary terms, is derived from the 

 same common root. This is clear from its adjective, which is hu-man-us : 

 while every school-boy knows that man or men, though not in the classical 

 nominative case of the substantive, is included in every inflection below the 

 nominative case : as ho-mm-is, ho-7mn-i, ho-mm-em, ho-min-e ; and it was 

 formerly included in the nominative itself, which was ho-men; whence 

 nothing is clearer than that the particle ho is redundant, and did not origin- 

 ally belong to the word. And were any additional argument necessary, I 

 might advert to the well-known fact, that this redundant particle is abso- 

 lutely omitted in the negation of homo, which is not ne-homo, but nemo, and 

 was at first ne-men; and which, like homo, or homen, runs, as every one 

 knows ne-mm-is, uc-min-'i, &c. It is easy, however, to prove this redundancy 

 of the ho, by showing the quarter from which it was derived. The old Latin 

 term was ho-men, ho-min-is ; which every one must perceive is literally the 

 obsolete Greek i^tv, with the article h added to it; h iiev or ho-men, empliatically 

 the man. The ho is also omitted in the feminine of horno, which is fe-min-a, 

 and was at first feo-min-a, from feo, to produce; literally, the producer, or 

 bringer forth of man, or mm. Nothing, as it appears to me, is clearer than 



