The Treasury of Languages.

A RUDIMENTARY DICTIONARY OF UNIVERSAL PHILOLOGY. Daniel iii. 4. עממיא אמיא ולשניא HALL AND Co., 25, PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON. ADVERTISEMENT. The following compilation presents the mere skeleton outline of a great subject; and, in submitting it to public notice, acknowledgment is most justly due to Me rs. Bagster and Sons , for permi ion to use the literary matter of their interesting and instructive volume, the “Bible in Every Land;” and to Me rs. Long mans & Co. , for a like favour with regard to Dr. Latham’s “Elements of Comparative Philology,” a laborious, learned, and useful book, without which the present volume could not have been produced. The compiler readily apologises for any defects in his matter and manner; and takes this opportunity to thank his respected contributors, hereby exonerating them from any responsibility except for their own signed articles. A list of signatures and writers will be found in the Appendix. 25, Paternoster Row , February 7th, 1873 . thereabouts) the same parallels on the side of the Indian Ocean. Neither, however, carries us beyond a limited area inland. Where these two limits, East and West, end, South Africa begins. It is, with the exception of the few degrees of latitude just indicated, either equatorial or belonging to the Southern tropic; it falls into two divisions. (8) The Inter-Tropical, or Kaffir. (9) The Extra-Tropical, or Hottentot. All these divisions are simply what their names imply, except only that Sene gambia is made to reach as far as Cape Mesurado, so as to include the parts about Sierra Leone and Cape Mount. American. —The primary division is that between North and South. (1) In North America the connection with Asia is decided. Through the Aleutian dialect of the Eskimo and the Kamtschatkan it is direct; through the Yukahiri and other tongues it is indirect. The Eskimo is a definite cla ; the Athabascan is also a definite cla when compared with the Algonkin. The Chemmesyan, Hailtsa, Wakash, and Chinook are connected. The Jakon and Kallapuiah lead to the languages of the Sahaptin and Shoshoni cla , among the congeners of which the sound of “tl” appears. In the Mexican it becomes prominent. Between the Rocky Mountains and the Pacific the Algonkin appears to have spread from West to East, and the result has told most on the Iroquois family. The South Oregon languages graduate into the Californian, the Californian into those of the Paduca cla and those of Sonora, till we come to two great divisions, the Mexican and the Maya. (2) In South America there is a reappearance of the phenomena of the North: what the Athabascan and Algonkin are in the one peninsula, the Quichua, the Carib, and, above all, the Guarani are in the other. With any South American vocabulary of adequate length, some North American root presents itself; some even from the extreme North, viz., the Eskimo area, which, along with the phenomena of transition, is the chief argument in favour of the fundamental unity of the two cla es. The student from Peru finds Quichua words in every vocabulary he lights upon, whilst the student from Brazil finds Guarani words. Asian. —Asia and Europe, though different quarters of the globe, form but a single continent, and as such have characteristics of their own. One great cla of languages is absolutely common to the two—the great Ugrian or Fin family. We mi , no doubt, in Europe such districts as those of Caucasus, and the parts to the North of the Burmese Empire, where numerous mutually unintelligible languages are pre ed together within a small area. Again, the inflected languages have their seat in Europe; the monosyllabic in Asia. On the other hand, it is only in the great central continent that Language can be studied in all its stages: the Monosyllabic stage in the South-East of Asia, and the Inflectional in Western and Southern Europe. This makes Asia and Europe the only region in which the whole (or nearly the whole) history of Language can be studied. Besides this, in Europe and Asia we have a history. We can see how languages like the English and Ru ian are extending themselves; how the German has extended itself; how the Latin had previously extended itself. We can see how languages like the Keltic, the Lithuanic, and the Fin recede. (1) The Western division is the one with which we are most familiar; it includes Great Britain, France, Spain, Italy, Germany, the Valley of the Danube, and Greece; allowance being made for the Turk and Hungarian, which are intrusive. (2) The great Northern area is in Ru ia conterminous with the Western, which means, roughly speaking, Northern Asia with a large part of Europe; the chief displacements having been effected by the great spread of the Turk language. (3) The South-Eastern area begins with the North frontier of China, and includes Thibet, Nipal, the Trans gang etic peninsula, A am, Siam, Pegu, Cambogia, Cochin-China, and China. (4) The South-Western area contains India, Persia, and the Caucasus; here the displacing languages are Indian, Persian, and Arabic, which last is treated as African. Oceanic. —The first thing which commands attention is its thorough insular or oceanic character; subordinate to this is the remarkable distribution of its members. In one great division, viz., the Polynesian, the diffusion has been decidedly recent. The first primary division contains the Malay; the second has been called Mic rones i an; the third division is Polynesia proper. The second group is called Kelenonesian or Me lanes i an, including Papuan, Australian, and Tasmanian (“Elements,” p. 377). Australian languages are all upon the same general grammatical construction. Mr. Moor house says that “not one-twentieth part of the words agree in root, and yet there is evidence sufficient to satisfy any one that they belong to the same family.” All have suffixes to show relation; a dual in substantives, adjectives, and pronouns; no sibilant sounds, no auxiliary verb, no pa ive voice, no “h,” they abound in the pleonastic, and distinguish genders by postfixes. The only point of agreement is in the first personal pronoun, “I”; this is “nga-nga” on the Swan River; “nga-toa” in New South Wales; “nga-ti,” Adelaide; “ngai-tyo,” Mount Barker; “gni,” Murchison River; “nga-pe,” Encounter Bay; “ngai,” Port Lincoln; “nga-ppo,” Murray River; “naddo,” Murrumbidgee River; “nga-pe,” Lower Murray; “nog a-toa,” Hunter River. At the same time, the Malayan is “nga-n”; the Sumba, “nga-nga”; the Thibet i an, “nga”; the Corean, “nai”; and the Burmese, “ngai.” Yet Dr. Latham finds no Australian dialects resemble those of the Asiatic Isles. Mr. Norris first detected similarity of the grammar between the Australian and the South Dravidian languages of India, spoken before the Aryan migration to the Ganges. Mr. J. R. Logan, of Singapore, thinks the Australian the most ancient of the Indo-Australian tongues. He says they are “a remnant of the Proto-Scythic era of the harmonic development, and between Chinese and American.” He regards them, with the other kindred dialects of South-Eastern Asia, as in existence “before the expansion of the numerals one, two, and three into higher binary and ternary terms.” According to him, “the pronominal roots are compounded with definitives, singular and plural, with the numeral two to form duals, with masculine and feminine definitives in the third person, and in all the three persons with each other; thus producing not only absolute and relative plurals of the first person, but several other complex plurals.” J. B. October 31st, 1873. dICTIONARY OF LANGUAGES. ☞ For Additions see Appendix. ☞ A