Liang.
Malayan: dialect of Amboynese. Wallace: “Malay Arch.”
Libyan.
Languages often called by the vague term Berber. These languages must now be reckoned as at least five in number: the Showiah, or Algerine Berber; the Shilha, or Morocco Berber; the Tamashight, or Berber south of Mount Atlas. The last is the purest and most widely extended. Besides these there are two others of very limited extent, that of the town of Ghadames and that of the Benî Menasser. These languages were formerly all one, as Augustine says: “In Africâ barbaras gentes in unâ linguâ plurimas novimus.” Hanoteau has made the very interesting remark that to translate from the Tamashight into Arabic, and reciprocally, though the vocabulary is widely different, is peculiarly easy, yet this proves common cultivation rather than a common origin. In a preface to the 4th appendix to Barth’s fifth volume of “Travels in Africa,” a summary is given by Professor F. W. Newman of the grammatical relations of the three chief languages to one another, but it was written without the advantage of Hanoteau’s Tamashight Grammar. We can now judge pretty accurately how they are all related to Hebrew. F. W. N. See [Hebræo-African].
⁂ Many inscriptions in the ancient written languages remain, some bilingual, Phœnician, and Lybian. H. C.
Lief.
Ugrian: dialect of Fin, spoken in Kurland.
⁂ This name is the root word of Livonia or Lief-land, a Russian government on the Baltic, but the native name for the original population is “Rahwa,” and these forms of speech are separated. The Liefs of Kurland call themselves “Sea-shore men”; the true Kurlanders speak Lithuanic. See [Curish].
Lieflandic.