Vestiges of the natural history of creation / [Anon].

  • Robert Chambers
Date:
1844
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Vestiges of the natural history of creation / [Anon]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    298/408 page 290
    The second great family of languages is the Syro-Phenician, comprising the Hebrew, Syro-° Chaldaic, Arabic, and Gheez or Abyssinian, being localized principally in the countries to the. west and south of the Mediterranean. Beyond them, again, is the African family, which, as far as re- search has gone, seems to be in like manner marked by common features, both verbal and grammatical, The fourth is the Polynesian family, extending from Madagascar on the west, through all the Indian Archipelago, besides taking in the Malayan dialect from the continent of India, and comprehending Australia and the islands of the western portion of the Pacific. This family, how- ever, bears such an affinity to that next to be described, that Dr. Leyden and some others do not give it a distinct place as a family of languages. member of this confederacy, but has brought to it most important aid; for, from it alone can be satisfactorily explained some of the conjugational endings in the other languages. For instance, the third person plural of the Latin, Persian, Greek, and Sanscrit ends in nt, nd, v71, v7o, nti, or nt. Now, supposing, with most grammarians, that the inflections arose from the pronouns of the respective persons, it is only in Celtic that we find a pronoun that can explain this termination; for there, too, the same person ends in nt, and thus corresponds exactly, as do the others, with its pronoun, hwynt, or ynt.”
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