ARTICULATE OR ARTIFICIAL LANGUAGE. g99 



ioiage of the Deity ; whence el-langee means the sky, or sun's residence, 

 ,md papa ellangee, or papa langee, fathers of the sky, or spirits y 



Allow me to offer you another instance or two. Tiie more common 

 etymon for death, among all nations, is mer, mort, or mut ; sometimes 

 the r, and sometimes the r, being dropped in the carelessness of speech. 

 It is mut in Hebrew and Phoenician ; it is mor^ or mort^ in Sanscrit, Per- 

 sian, Greek, and Latin ; it is the same in almost all the languages of Eu- 

 rope ; and it was with no small astonishment the learned lately found out 

 that it was the same also in Otaheite, and some other of the Polynesian 

 islands, in which mor-ai is well known to signify a sepulchre; literally, the 

 place or region of the dead ; ai meaning a place or region in Otaheitan, 

 precisely as it does in Greek. An elegant and expressive compound, 

 and which is perhaps only to be equalled by the Hebrew zalmut (niD '7:^} 

 literally, death-shade, but which is uniformly rendered, in the established 

 copy of our Bibles, shadow of death. 



Sir, in our own language, is the common title of respect ; and the 

 same term is employed in the same sense throughout every quarter of the 

 globe. In Hebrew its radical import is a ruler or governor;" sir, s-her, 

 or sher, according as the h is suppressed, or slightly, or strongly aspirated ; 

 in Sanscrit and Persian it means the organ of the head itself ; in Greek 

 it is used in a sense somewhat more dignified, and is synonymous with lord; 

 in Arabia, Turkey, and among the Peruvians in South America, it is em- 

 ployed as in the Greek ; and not essentially different in Spain, Portugal. 

 Italy, and France ; the last country never using it, however, but with a 

 personal pronoun prefixed ; and it is the very same term in Germany, Hol- 

 land, find the contiguous countries ; the s being dropped in consequence 

 of the h being aspirated more harshly ; whence the Hebrew s-her is con- 

 verted into her, used also commonly, as the similar term is in France, with 

 the prefix of a personal pronoun. 



The radical idea of the word man is that of a thinldng 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 as- 

 sert, 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 man- 

 kind 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 some 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 n3D [maneh), a verb directly importing " to 

 discern or discriminate and which, hence, signifies as a noun, " a dis 

 eerning 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 " tb think or reason ;" while the sub- 

 stantive is mana, of precisely the same meaning as our own word man • 

 ^nd necessarily importing, as I have already observed, a thinking or rea- 

 sonable creature." Hence Menu-, in both Sanscrit and ancient Egyptian, 

 is synonymous with Adam, oj: the first man, emphatically the man ; hence, 

 again, Menes was the first king of Egypt ; and Minos, the first or chief 

 judge, discerner, or arbitrator among the Greeks. Hence, also, in Greek, 

 men and menos (ftev and M.mi) signify wind. or. the thinking faculty C 



