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LECTURE III.
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guages that may hold its place by the side of Bopp's great work on the Comparative Grammar of the Aryan Languages.
But what is still more surprising to me is that no Semitic scholar should have followed the example of the Aryan scholars, and collected from the different Semitic dialects those common words which must have existed before Hebrew was Hebrew, before Syriac was Syriac, and before Arabic was Arabic, and from which some kind of idea might be formed as to what were the principal thoughts and occupations of the Semitic race in its earliest undivided state. The materials seem much larger and much more easily accessible1. And though there may be some difficulty arising from the close contact which continued to exist between several branches of the Semitic family, it would surely be possible, by means of phonetic rules, to distinguish between common Semitic words, and words borrowed, it may be, by the Arabs from Aramæan sources. The principal degrees of relationship, for instance, have common names among the Semitic as among the Aryan nations, and if it was important to show that the Aryans had named and recognised not only the natural members of a family, such as father and mother, son and daughter, brother and sister, but also the more distant members, the father and mother-in-law, the son and daughterin-law, the brother and sister-in-law, would it not be of equal interest to show that the Semitic nations had reached the same degree of civilisation long before the time of the laws of Moses?
1 See Bunsen's Christianity and Mankind,' vol. iii. p. 246, iv. P. 345.
