what beyond, the Christian era, give scanty representation of dialects nearly kindred. That which we call the Arabic was, anterior to Mohammed, the spoken dialect of the tribes occupying the central part of the country; that is to say, of that part of the population which was of purest Semitic blood, and less affected than any other, in language, manners, and institutions, by disturbing foreign influences. As a natural consequence of the political and religious revolution by which Islamism became the religion, first of Arabia, then of so large a portion of Asia and Africa, this dialect has had a career almost comparable with that of the Latin. It has extinguished nearly all the other dialects of the Semitic family within their ancient limits; it has spread over Egypt and the whole northern coast of Africa; the language of Spain, and yet more the Hindustani of central India, have borrowed abundantly of its material; the modern literary Persian and Turkish have their vocabularies made up almost more of Arabic words than of those of native growth. Of the wonderfully rich and various Arabic literature, of the part it played in the preservation and transmission of classical learning to modern times, of the treasures of information it contains respecting the history and geography of the Orient, it is not necessary here to speak; the theme belongs to literary, not to linguistic, history. We turn to a consideration of the chief peculiarities of Semitic language.
The Semitic type of speech is called inflective, like the Indo-European, and philologists are accustomed to allow the title to no other languages than these two. We must beware, however, of supposing that this inclusion in one morphological class implies any genetic relationship between the families, or is to be regarded as even suggesting the probability of their common descent. There is between them, on the contrary, only such a resemblance as is due to a correspondence of natural endowments in the language-making races. Semitic inflection is so totally diverse from Indo-European inflection, that the historical transition from the one to the other, or from a common original to both, is of a difficulty which cannot be exceeded. The Semitic tongues possess in many respects a more peculiar and isolated
