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Aryo-Semitic Speech: A Study in Linguistic Archaeology
AryoSemitic Speech A Study in Linguistic Archaeology Author:James F. McCurdy Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: The inherent difficulties of this branch of the investigation are that we do not know the roots of the numerals, and that the further back we go to their primary... more » forms the less resemblance they seem to show ; while as to the pronouns. as we shall see later, the phonological investigation is somewhat uncertain. The testimony from this source is, moreover, too general to be universally satisfactory, since several pronouns are alike in a great many other families of speech. Ascoli has also formulated laws of phonetic change. To Von Raumer's rules he adds a third, to the effect that an Aryan g is represented in Semitic by p. The evidence given for this is scanty and precarious. The most scientific and also the most satisfactory attempt to prove an Aryo-Semitic relationship is undoubtedly that of Friedrich Delitzsch, in his Indogermanisch-Semitische Wurzelverwandtschaft (1873). As to his general attitude towards the question, he is fully convinced of the hopelessness of attempting to reconcile the divergent grammatical systems ; but holds it to be a possibility, that at some remote period, before any flectional tendency was exhibited in either, they possessed a common stock of roots. In seeking to ascertain the roots which may be shown to have once been the same, he recognizes the principle that we must aim to draw them only from the original languages from which the two families arose respectively. In making up the list of dialects from which the original Semitic language must be constructed, as far as its roots are concerned, he rejects the Old Egyptian rightly and the Assyrian wrongly. His view as to the latter appears (p. 29) to have been, that for lexical purposes Assyrian roots could not afford any essential help in the solution of the problem. But his own valuable labors sinc...« less