Man and His Migrations

by R. G. Latham

In many languages there is an inability to pronounce two consonants belonging to the same syllable, in immediate succession; an inability which is met by the insertion of an intervening vowel. The Finlander, instead of Krist, must say either Ekristo or Keristo. This principle, in English, would convert bred into bered or ebred, and stôn into estôn or setôn. This is another fact.

These two and the preceding ones should now be combined. A large proportion of roots containing three consonants may induce a grammarian to coin such a term as triliteralism, and to say that this triliteralism characterizes a certain language.

Then, as not only these consonants are separated from one another by intervening vowels, but as the vowels themselves are subject to change, (these changes acting upon the accentuation,) the triliteralism becomes more important still. The consonants look like the framework or skeleton of the words, the vowels being the modifying influences. The one are the constants, the other the variants; and triliteral roots with internal modifications becomes a philological byword which is supposed to represent a unique phenomenon in the way of speech, rather than the simple result of two or three common processes united in one and the same language.

But the force of system does not stop here. Suppose we wished to establish the paradox that the English was a language of the sort in question. A little ingenuity would put us up to some clever legerdemain. The convenient aspirate h—like the bat in the fable of the birds and beasts at war—might be a consonant when it was wanted to make up the complement of three, and a vowel when it was de trop. Words like pity might be made triliteral (triconsonantal) by doubling the tt; words like pitted, by ejecting it. Lastly, if it were denied that two consonants must necessarily be separated by a vowel, it would be an easy matter to say that between such sounds as the n and r in Henry, the b and r in bread, the r and b in curb, there was really a very short vowel; and that Henĕry, bĕred, curŭb, were the true sounds; or that, if they were not so in the nineteenth century, they were two thousand years ago.

Now let all this be taught and believed, and who will not isolate the language in which such remarkable phenomena occur?

All this is taught and believed, and consequently there is a language, or rather a group of languages, thus isolated.

But the isolation does not stop with the philologist. The anatomist and the historian support it as well. The nations who speak the language in question are in the neighbourhood of Blacks, but without being Blacks themselves; and they are in contact with rude Pagans; themselves being eminently monotheistic. Their history also has been an influential one, morally and materially as well; whilst the skulls are as symmetrical as the skull of the famous Georgian female of our first chapter, their complexions fair or ruddy, and their noses so little African as to emulate the eagle’s beak in prominent convexity. All this exaggerates the elements of isolation.

The class or family thus isolated, which—as stated above—has a real existence, has been conveniently called Semitic; a term comprising the twelve tribes of Israel and the modern Jews so far as they are descended from them, the Syrians of ancient, and, partially, of modern Syria, the Mesopotamians, the Phœnicians, the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Arabs, and certain populations of Æthiopia or Abyssinia.

Further facts, real or supposed, have contributed to isolate this remarkable and important family. The Africans who were nearest to them, both in locality and civilization—the Ægyptians of the Pharaohnic empire, builders of the pyramids, and writers in hieroglyphics—have ceased to exist as a separate substantive nation. Their Asiatic frontagers, on the other hand, were either Persians or Armenians.

Everything favoured isolation here. The Jew and Ægyptian were in strong contrast from the beginning, and all our earliest impressions are in favour of an over-valuation of their differences. As for the Persian, he was so early placed in a different class—a class which, from the fact of its being supposed to contain the Germans, Greeks, Latins, Slavonians, and Hindus as well, has been called Indo-European—that he had a proper and peculiar position of his own; and something almost as stringent in the way of demarcation applied to the Armenian. Where, then, were the approaches to the Semitic family to be found?