Views in ethnography, the classification of languages, the progress of civilization, and the natural history of man / [Charles T. Beke].

  • Charles Tilstone Beke
Date:
1835]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Views in ethnography, the classification of languages, the progress of civilization, and the natural history of man / [Charles T. Beke]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    be applied, ana which are, in reality, entitled to the appellation of Hamitish alone. Since then the languages spoken by the descendants of Isaac and of Ishmael, the sons of Abraham, — namely, the Hebrew and the Arabic,—are thus found to be cognate with those which are so widely spread among the descendants of Ham, it would seem most reasonable to imagine that the former languages, in¬ stead of being the representatives of the Shemitish tongue which was spoken by Abraham either in Chaldea or Aram, are the Hamitish languages which were vernacular in the countries in which that patriarch and his descendants took up their residence, and were, in fact, acquired by them during their residence there¬ in, to the exclusion of their paternal tongue. This hypothesis has been advocated at length in the Origines Biblicce. In the same work it has also been attempted to be shewn that the so-called Chaldee is merely a corruption of the Hebrew spoken by the Jews during their captivity in Babylon, and not the native lan¬ guage which at that epoch was vernacular in Babylon itself; which language, from the few proper names met with in the Hebrew Scriptures, and the remains of it preserved in thecu- neiform characters (if rightly interpreted), was of Japhthitish origin, and closely related to, if not identical with, the Zend. In like manner is the Syriac to be regarded as only a further degradation and corruption of the Hebrew. Under no circum¬ stances, indeed, can it claim to be the primitive native tongue of the countries in which it was spoken about the period of the commencement of the Christian era ; for, subjected as they had been to repe£ted*nnfl continued foreign invasion and occupation, it is impossible that any native language should, during more than twenty centuries,-have continued to exist without very con¬ siderable alterations, if, indeed, it must not have been altogether extirpated. The appellation of Semitic or Shemitish, as applied to these languages, must therefore be superseded by that of Hamitish ; under which designation will have to be comprised not only the Canaanitish, Arabian, and African languages which have been enumerated, but also* the whole of the iptive dialects spoken throughout the continent of Africa; all thb inhabitants of which continent must, agreeably to the hypothesis advocated in this » »
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