most of the mixed languages [i. e. in the languages of the great central zone of Africa, which Lepsius holds to have taken shape by mixture of South-African and Hamitic elements], with exception of the most eastern ones . . . where, evidently under Hamitic influence, it is given up and replaced by the Hamitic order [namely, with the verb at the end]."

In the expression here used, of two languages "coming to a mutual understanding," as in some of those employed by the same author in other places, is implied a theory of mixture quite different from that which, as explained above, is suggested by all the best-understood historical examples of mixture. He compares it (p. lxxxii.) with what "still happens every day, when two individuals of different tongue are thrown together and obliged to understand one another: all grammar, namely, is laid aside, or represented only by gesture and grimace, and the names of things and of the commonest acts, in a mutilated form, are adopted in common

use.

Now something like this is undoubtedly the case when the two individuals have a chance meeting, or when they fall in with one another only from time to time; but not at all, if they come to live together (like Robinson and Friday): ́in that case, it will inevitably be found after a while that one of them has learned to understand and use the language of the other; they will speak the same tongue, indeed, but it will be no mixed jargon; it will be substantially the original language of one of the two individuals, somewhat modified (but not mixed) in its grammar, and with more or less of material brought in from the other language. That is to say the result will be precisely accordant with that which, as was seen above, has been found normally to follow when two communities mix: not A B, but either Ab or Ba. The one party, after a certain period of fluctuation and struggle, abandons its own tongue and puts in its place the strange tongue which it has learned. When members of two communities, each of which maintains its own speech for its own purposes, meet occasionally for special ends, there can grow up a jargon for their joint use, like the "pigeon English" of the countinghouses of China; but no such barbarous result has ever been

shown to come from that more intimate association which makes a family or a community; and until such an instance is found, no one has a right to assume that two grammatical systems, or two vocabularies, can meet and mingle on equal terms. The resistance of one of the two parties to accepting frankly and fully the speech-usages of the other is practically less in every instance than their joint resistance to a mixture of usages. And when one-be he individual or community - learns a new language, he learns not its individual signs only, but also its phraseology, its inflections, its syntax, the order of its words: these are all part and parcel of the same process. That the new speakers may show a degree of tendency, while their speech is still a broken one, to cast the new material into their own familiar order, need not be denied ; but it is in the highest degree improbable that their errors in this respect should have any traceable influence on the usages of the rest of the community: after subsisting for a while as errors, they will disappear. The language which proves strong enough to impose itself on those to whom it is not native will have no noticeable difficulty in making them accept its own order of arrangement.

On the whole, we are justified in refusing for the present to admit the power of mixture to change the order of words in a language, except in the same secondary and subordinate way in which the formative apparatus may come to be changed in consequence of mixture: namely, by contributing to the forces which are slowly and almost insensibly determining the growth of a language an element which may finally work itself out into visible consequences. If the French can have come to violate the primeval law of Indo-European position 1 so far as to put its adjectives prevailingly after the nouns they qualify; if the German can establish so peculiar rules of place for some of its sentence-elements by internal development, against the example and influence (assuming that it be proper to speak of such) of all the languages about it, related and unrelated then it must be very dangerous to charge upon foreign influence a difference of arrangement

1 See Delbrück's Syntaktische Forschungen, iii. 35.

which any tongue in any part of the world may exhibit as compared with its relations.

These, it seems to me, are the conclusions respecting mixture to which we are led by a consideration of the facts thus far brought to light. What is needed in order further to advance our comprehension of the subject is, first of all, a new and more penetrating examination of the facts themselves, with a distinct eye to the general principles that are in question. Nothing could be a better introduction to this than an exhaustive study of the English as a mixed language (for nothing deserving such a name has ever yet been made); to which would be added a like study of the other notable historical cases: and thus the way would be prepared for a thorough discussion of the philosophy of mixture. But it is altogether probable that the result would only be to establish on a firmer basis the principles provisionally stated above, and to cut off all possibility of the assumption, for any stage or period in the history of language, of a mingling in the same tongue of diverse structural elements, forms or formwords, otherwise than by the same secondary process, of growth involving borrowed and assimilated material, which we see to have brought Romanic ingredients into the grammatical structure of English words and sentences.

II. The Home of the Primitive Semitic Race.

BY CRAWFORD H. TOY,

PROFESSOR IN HARVARD UNIVERSITY.

THE linguistic sense of the word "Semitic" is well fixed; it includes all languages of the type of the Arabic,—that is, Babylonian-Assyrian, Aramaic, Phenician-Canaanitish, Arabic, Sabean, and Geez, or Ethiopic. Its ethnological sense is not so generally agreed on. While most writers use it of all the peoples who spoke or speak the languages above named, by some it is restricted to those who are mentioned in the table of nations in the tenth chapter of Genesis as descended from

Shem, the son of Noah. This difference of signification, however, amounts to little or nothing in an inquiry into the original home of the Semitic race. The list given in the table of nations includes most of the peoples whose language is Semitic, namely, the Assyrians, the Arameans, the Hebrews, and the Arabians; if the original abode of these could be discovered, we may be sure that it would include all Semites. Of the nations omitted in the table, the Babylonians would certainly go along with the Assyrians; and the Phenicians, Canaanites, Philistines, and Moabites (if they were Semites) could not be separated from the Hebrews; nor the Sabeans and the Geez from the Arabians. On the other hand it may fairly be assumed that the regions Elam and Lud, assigned to Shem in the table, but later occupied by Indo-Europeans (though the geographical position of Lud is doubtful), were once peopled by a race who spoke a Semitic tongue, and were not different in blood from their Babylonian and Aramean neighbors. If a region could be found once inhabited by the primitive people from whom came the Assyrians, the Arameans, the Hebrews, and the Arabs, that would be accepted as a satisfactory solution of the question as to the cradle of the Semitic race. I shall use the term Semitic here in the wider ethnological sense, to include all the peoples who spoke Semitic tongues, and only these; but, for the reason just given, those who prefer the definition of the table of nations can so understand the word without materially affecting the arguments that will be considered. The determination of

the original dwelling-place of one of the great races is of course a matter of no little importance for the early history of man. We have lately seen how much light has been thrown on the civilization of the Hebrews by the definite fixing of their Babylonian or Mesopotamian origin; but we are still embarrassed by the uncertainty as to the point from which the Phenicians came. If we knew the starting-points of the Egyptians, the Semites, the Indo-Europeans, the Turanians, and the Chinese, we should have made a long step backward toward the beginning of our history. These wide problems have something specially attractive in them, and

have received their due share of attention.

The number and diversity of the theories are in some cases in proportion to the number and complicated character of the data, in other cases in proportion to their fewness. In respect to the primitive home of Egyptians, Turanians, and Chinese there is room for a good deal of arbitrary hypothesis and fancy, because neither the linguistic, nor the ethnological, nor the historical relations of those families have been satisfactorily worked out. Even in the case of the comparatively well known IndoEuropean family, almost every separate language of which has been carefully studied, and where comparisons and inferences are guarded by strict scientific rules, the theories of geographical origin have ranged over a good part of Asia and Europe. Semitic scholars also have not failed to contribute their share towards the solution of the general problem. The conditions in this case cannot be considered specially unfavorable. The territory occupied by the Semitic family is inconsiderable in extent. The race has never pushed far beyond its early historical borders, except in the case of the Geez and in very modern conquests in the time of Islam; and these movements have not been attended with any marked linguistic or other changes. The various dialects have been studied with thoroughness (with the exception of the Babylonian-Assyrian, in which the chief interest has up to this time been historical and literary), and the era of grammatical research is just beginning; the literary material is abundant, and the historical records are not exceeded in distinctness and antiquity by those of any people in the world, unless it be the Egyptian. The problem of the original Semitic home is not, therefore, comparatively difficult, and might seem at first to be even very easy. That it is not, however, free from difficulty appears from the number of different solutions of it that have been given. In truth, at the outset, when we recollect the gray antiquity to which the primitive Semitic motherrace must go back, and the great changes that may have taken place between its first breaking-up and the beginning of historical times, it is evident that great caution is necessary in attempting to reconstruct a period that lies so far away from