SEMITIC LANGUAGES 335 SEMMERING European and of most Asiatic alphabets, while the alphabet of the great Sabaean kingdom, or of the great and still more ancient Minaean kingdom in Arabia, is apparently the oldest of all alphabets hitherto discovered; in the Babylonian and Assyrian empires; in the Hebrew Bible and the Jewish religion ; in the New Testament and the Christian religion; in the Koran and the Mohammedan re- ligion; in the Mohammedan conquests and empire; and in the preservation of culture thereby during the Dark Ages and the Middle Ages. SEMITIC LANGUAGES, the languages spoken by the Semitic nations. One char- acteristic feature of them is triconsonan- tal roots from which by prefixed or af- fixed letters, but mostly by internal vowel changes, the other words are formed. Thus in Arabic kataba—"b.e wrote," bdtib = "a scribe," kitdb="a book," maktub — "an epistle." Another characteristic fea- ture is that, though personal pronouns are affixed to nouns, verbs, and prepo- sitions, there is an almost total absence of derivative nouns, adjectives, and verbs. Thus, while in Arabic beiti — "my house," qatalahu="he killed him," minh&= "from her," there are no such derivatives as pro-motion, dread-ful, frati-fy. The most highly developed, and on the whole the most characteristic (probably also the oldest of the group ) , is Arabic, which, with its ancient Sabaean, and Minsean dialects of southern, western, and northern Arabia, and with Ethiopic, forms the S. division of Semitic lan- guages, marked by the use of "broken plurals," in which the consonants of the singular are presented, while the vowels are as much altered as possible. Thus from the Arabic kitdb, "a book," comes the plural kutub. Another mark is the universal use of a before the third radi- cal letter of the active preterites; thus Arabic has qdttala, dqtala, for which Hebrew has qittel and hiqtil. Hebrew, though a characteristically Semitic speech, shows many marks of linguistic decadence; ancient Hebrew is a more modern type of language than modern Arabic. Phoenician differs little in grammar and dictionary from Hebrew. In the African territory of Carthage this language was spoken 400 years after the Christian era; a century before that era in Phoenicia itself it yielded to Aramaean or to Greek. Moabitic, as the Moabite Stone of the 9th century b. c. shows, was Hebrew. Aramaean had its home in Aram of Damascus and Aram of Mesopotamia. It was the language of Assyria from early times, as we may see in II Kings xviii., and of Babylonia, even while Assyrian was used there for official purposes. It was the official language of the province* of the Persian empire W. of the Eu- phrates. Its W. branch was the language of Palmyra and of the N. part of the Arabian kingdom of the Nabatheans, and is seen in the Biblical books of Ezra and Daniel, where it has been erroneously named Chaldee. Later developments of this branch are the officially recognized "Targums" by Onkelos on the Penta- teuch, and Jonathan on the Prophets, which were finally edited and fixed in the 4th or 5th century a. d. in Babylonia. Somewhat later are some "Midrashes," the Jerusalem "Targums," and the Jeru- salem "Talmud." Of the 4th or 5th cen- tury are Palestinian translations of the Gospel. Samaritan is another branch of western Aramaean, written in a Hebrew alphabet older than the Captivity, and spoken about 432 B. c. by an Aramaean people with Israelitish blood in them, who were desirous of conforming in speech as in religion to the Hebrew usage of northern Palestine, Arabic soon expelled western Aramaean after the Mohamme- dan conquest, though a faint echo of it still lingers in the Anti-Libanus. The Babylonian Talmud shows the common eastern Aramaean of Babylonia from the 4th to the 6th century. The language of the Mandsean sect resembles it. In the 2d century the Edessan dialect of Aramaean, which we call Syriac, began to be the language of eastern Christen- dom for all purposes; but for popular use it was slowly supplanted by Arabic after the Mohammedan conquest, becom- ing a dead and almost entirely ecclesias- tical language. In the mountain regions of ancient Assyria Aramaean is still rep- resented by several local dialects among Christians and even Jews. Assyrian, so called by us moderns because discovered by us in Assyria, is more correctly named Babylonian. It is written in the dif- ficult, cumbrous, and inadequate cunei- form character received from the Tu- ranian natives. It shows scarcely any sign of a preterite tense. In popular use it early gave way to Aramaean. Ethiopic, a sister tongue to Arabic, in some respects resembles more closely He- brew and Aramaean even in the most ancient form of the language known to us. SEMMERING, a mountain of Austria, 4,575 feet high, on the borders of Styria and lower Austria, 44 miles S. W. of Vienna. It is crossed by the Semmering railway, the first of the mountain rail- ways in Europe. The railway is carried along the face of precipices, through 15 tunnels, and over 16 viaducts, the sur- rounding scenery being magnificent. It was constructed at a cost of $5,000,000
