Please state what is the population of Peking, China, and settle a dispute.
David McGowan.
Answer.—According to the “American Almanac,” which in turn refers to the famous “Bevolkerung der Erde,” of Gotha, edited by Messrs. Behm & Wagner, the population of Peking in 1880 was 500,000. Until within a comparatively recent date the estimates of the population of that city never ranged below 1,000,000. Cyclopedias generally estimated it at 1,500,000, and some of them as high as 2,000,000. Messrs. Behm & Wagner have carefully revised their former statistics of China, and have reduced their estimate of the total population of the country fully 55,000,000. The Almanach de Gotha gives the population of Pekin as uncertain, estimates varying between 500,000 and 1,650,000.
HEBREW NOT A LIVING LANGUAGE.
Rapid City, D. T.
A Jewish gentleman and myself have had an argument, he asserting that Hebrew is a spoken language at the present time. I am of the impression that Hebrew ceased to be a spoken language during the seventy years’ captivity in Babylon, while he declares that he has seen a Jew, directly from Jerusalem, who could talk nothing but Hebrew. Can you give us any light on this subject?
H. H. J.
Answer.—Hebrew, like Latin and classic Greek, is a literary, and not a colloquial language. The precise time when Hebrew ceased to be the living, vernacular language of the Jews is not known. Some learned Hebraists maintain that they lost the living use of the Hebrew during the Babylonish captivity, but the weight of argument is in favor of the belief that they retained the partial use of it for some time after their return to Palestine, and lost it by degrees. No decisive evidence, however, shows exactly when it became a virtually dead language; although there are satisfactory reasons for declaring that it gave place to a corrupted form of the Aramaic language, a mixture of Syrian and Chaldean or Babylonish speech called the Syro-Chaldaic dialect, several hundred years before the Christian era, and that more than a century before this era it ceased to be used even as a written language and was thenceforth studied only as the language of the sacred books, by the learned.