Atlanta tri-weekly journal. [volume] (Atlanta, Ga.) 1920-19??, 1922-11-21
The Outline of History-By H. G. Wells
|. The Romance of Mother Earth

tongues suggests that they originated over
some great area to the west, as the primitive
Semitic may have arisen to the east, of the
Red Sea divide. That divide was probably
much more effective in Pleistocene times;
the sea extended across the west of the 18TH
mus OF Suez, and great part of lower
Egypt was under water. Long before the
dawn of history, however, Asia and Africa
had Joined at SueZ, and these two languages
systems were in contact in that region. Ana
if Asia and Africa were separated then at
Suez, they may, on the other handy1 Lave
been Joined by way CT Arabia and Abyssinia.
These Hamitic languages may have radiat-
ed from a center on the African coast of the
Mediterranean, and they may have extended
over the then existing connections very wide
ly into western Europe.
The Common Feature of Gender
All these three great groups of languages,
it may be noted, the Aryan, Semitic, and
Hamitic, have one feature in common which
they do not share with any other language,
and that is grammatical gender; but whether
that has much weight as evidence of a re-
noted common origin Of Aryan, Semitic and
Hamitic, is a question for the philologist
rather than for the general student. It does
not affect the clear evidence of very long
and very ancient prehistoric separation of
the speakers of these three diverse groups of
tongues.
The bulk of the Semitic and Hamitic-speak-
ing peoples are put by ethnologists with the
They are white The Semitic and Nordic
traces" have a much more distinctive physi-
ognomy; they seem, like their characteristic
languages, to be more marked and specialized
than the Hamitic-speaking peoples.
Across to the northeast of the Aryan and
Semitic areas there must once have spread a
further distinct language system which is
now represented by a group of languages
known as the Turanian, or Ural-Baltiac group
This Includes the Lappish, of LaDland, and
~. . I. nsoI>
language, Magyar, Turkish or Tartar, Man
chu and Mongol; it has not as a group been
so exhaustively studied by European philolo-
gists, and there Is insufficient evidence yet
whether it does or does not include the Ko-
rean and Japanese languages. H. B. Hubert
has issued a comparative grammar of Ko-
rean and certain Of the ravidian languages
of India to demonstrate the close affinity he
finds between them.
The One-Syllable Language of the Chinese
A fifth region Of language formation was
southeastern Asia, where there still prevails
tables without any infections, in which the
tone used in uttering a word determines It's
meaning. This may be called the Chinese, or
Monosyllabic group, and it includes Chinese,
Burmese, Siamese and T1betan. The diner
ence between any of these Chinese tongues
and the more western languages is profound
In the Pekinese form Of Chinese there are
only about 400 primary monosyllables, and
consequently each of these has to do duty
for a great number Of things, and the differ
emit meanings are indicated either by the
context or by saying the. word in distinc-
tive tone.
The relations of these words-t each other
are expressed by quite different methods from
the Aryan methods; Chinese grammar is a
thing different in nature from English gram
mar; it is separate and different invention
Many writer's declare there is no Chinese
grammar at all, and that is true If We mean
by grammar anything il the European sense
Of infections and concords. Consequently
any such thing as literal translation from
Chinese into English is an impossibility. The
very method if the thought is different. Their
philosophy remains still largely sealed book
to the European on this account and vice
versa. because of the different nature Of the
expressions.
ITO BE CONTINUED