elements. It has no derivative apparatus by which noun-stems are made from roots; the root is the stem likewise, there is nothing that can be properly called either declension or conjugation, and the same pronominal particles or suffixes have now a subjective value, indicating use as a verb, and now a possessive, indicating use as a noun There is no method known to linguistic science by which the relationship of such a tongue as this with the highly and peculiarly infective Semitic can be shown, short of a thorough working out of the history of development of each family taken by itself, and a retracing in some measure of the steps by which each should have arrived at its present position from a common starting-point; and this has by no means been done. In short, the problem of the relation of Semitic with Hamitic, not less than with Indo-European, depends upon that of Semitic growth, and the two must be solved together There are striking correspondences between the pronouns of the two families, such as, if supported by evidences from other parts of their material, would be taken as signs of relationship, but, in the absence of such support, they are not to be relied upon, not till it can be shown to be possible that two languages could grow to be so different in all other respects as are Egyptian and Hebrew, and yet retain by inheritance corresponding pronouns And the possession of grammatical gender by Indo-European, Semitic and Hamitic speech, and by them almost alone, among all human languages, though an extremely noteworthy fact, is (as was pointed out above) in the present condition of linguistic science quite too
eak a basis for a belief in the original identity of the three
families
Egyptian is limited to the delta and valley of the Nile, and is the only Hamitic language which has ancient records, of the others the existing forms alone are known
The Libyan or Berber division of the family occupies the inhabitable part of northern Africa, so far as it has not been displaced by intrusive tongues of other connexion-in later times the Arabic, which since the Mahommedan conquest has been the cultivated tongue of the Mediterranean coast, while the earlier Vandal, Latin and Punic have disappeared, except in the traces they may have left in Berber dialectic speech The principal dialects are the Kabyle, the Shilha and the Tuarek or Tamashek, corresponding nearly to the ancient R umidian, Mauretanian and Gaetulian respectively. The third or Ethiopic division includes as its chief members the Beya or Bisharin, the Saho, the Dankali, the Somali, and the more inland Galla; the first two lying along the Red Sea north of Semitic Abyssinia, the others south of it, to the equator. By some authorities (Lepsius, Bleek) there is added to the Hamitic family as a fourth division a group from extreme southern Africa, the Hottentot and Bushman languages. The ground of this classification is the possession by the Hottentot of the distinction of grammatical gender, and even its designation by signs closely corresponding to those used in the Ethiopic division Others deny the sufficiency of this evidence, and rank the Hottentot as a separate group of African dialects, adding to it provisionally the Bushman, until better knowledge of the latter shall show whether it is or is not a group by itself If the Hottentot be Hamitic, we shall have to suppose it cut off at a very remote period from the rest of the family, and forced gradually southward, while all the time suffering mixture both of speech and of blood with the negro races, until the physical constitution of its speakers has become completely metamorphosed, and of its original speech no signs are left save those referred to above; and while such exceptional phonetic peculiarities have been worked out as the use of the clicks or clucking sounds' and this must be regarded as at least extremely difficult
4 Monosyllabic or South-eastern Asialio Family.-This body of languages may well enough be the next taken up; and here again (as was the case with the preceding family) on account of the prominent importance of one of its dialects and of the people speaking it-the Chinese people and language. The territory of the family includes the whole south-eastern corner of Asia China on the north-east, Farther India in the south, and the high plateau of Tibet, with the neighbouring Himalayan regions, to the westward. The ultimate unity of all these languages rests chiefly upon the evidence of their form, as being all alike essentially monosyllabic and isolating, or destitute of formal structure, the material correspondences among them, of accordant words, are not sufficient to prove them related. The Chinese itself can be followed up, in contemporary records, to a period probably not far from 2000 B c, and the language, the people, and their institutions, are then already in the main what they have ever since continued to be (see CHINA), the other leading tongues come into view much later, as they receive culture and religion from China on the one hand (the Annamites), or from India on the other (the Tibetans, Burmese, Siamese); and the territory includes great nun1bers of wild tribes unknown until our own times, whose race-relations and language-relations are as yet very obscure. Current opinion tends to regard the Annamites, Peguans and Cambodians (the Mon-Khmer group) as forming a more nearly related group or division, and as having been the earlier population of Farther India, in part dispossessed and driven forward by the later intrusion from the north of Siamese and Burmese, of whom the former are more nearly related to the Chinese and the latter to the Tibetans. The Mon-Khmer group is itself more nearly related to the Kolarian and Malay-Polynesian.
The character of the languages of this family, especially as instanced by its most important member, the Chinese, has been pretty fully set forth in the general discussions above. They are languages of roots that is to say, there is not demonstrable in any of their words a formative part, limiting the word, along with others similarly characterized, to a certain office or set of offices in the formation of the sentence That the words are ultimate roots, come down from the first period of language-making, we have no reason whatever to believe, and they may possibly have passed through processes of growth which equipped them with some scanty supply of forms, but no evidence to that effect has yet been produced. The indications relied on to show an earlier polysyllabisnii in the family (though already in Chinese reduced to monosyllabism before the earliest historical appearance of the language, some 4000 years ago) are the comparatively recent loss of certain final mutes in Chinese words, and the presence on a considerable scale in Tibetan spelling of added initial and final consonants, now silent in the literary dialect, but claimed to be still uttered in some parts of the country. If the theory connecting these phenomena be established, the Tibetan will approve itself to be by far the most primitive of the dialects of the family, furnishing the key to the history of the rest For further details respecting the various tongues of the monosyllabic family, the articles on the different divisions of its territory (BURMA; CHINA, SIAM, TIBET, &c) may be consulted. The languages all alike show an addition to the resources of distinction possessed by languages in general, in the use of tones: that is to say, words of which the alphabetic elements are the same differ in meaning according as they are uttered in a higher or a lower tone, with the rising or the falling inflexion, and so on. By this means, for example, the monosyllabic elements of the literary Chinese, numbering but 500 as we should write them, are raised to the number of about 1500 words.
5. U ml-Altaic (Scythiau, Tumman) Famzly -China and Tibet are bordered on the north and west by the eastern branches of another immense family, which stretches through central and northern Asia into Europe, overlapping the European border in Turkey, and reaching across it in Russia and Scandinavia to the very shore of the Atlantic Usage has not so definitely determined as in the case of most other families by what name it shall be called; Turanian is perhaps the commonest appellation, but also the most objectionable Five principal branches are generally reckoned as composing the family. The two easternmost are the Tungusian, with the Manchu for its principal division, and the Mongol (see MONGOLS)
