. Ridpath's Universal history : an account of the origin, primitive condition and ethnic development of the great races of mankind, and of the principal events in the evolution and progress of the civilized life among men and nations, from recent and authentic sources with a preliminary inquiry on the time, place and manner of the beginning. were so slight that verbs in theone form might be exchanged for theother form without confusing the ex-pression. One tense form of the vSem-itic verb denotes completed, and theother incomplete, action. Of the vastand varied modal development of theArvaii v
. Ridpath's Universal history : an account of the origin, primitive condition and ethnic development of the great races of mankind, and of the principal events in the evolution and progress of the civilized life among men and nations, from recent and authentic sources with a preliminary inquiry on the time, place and manner of the beginning. were so slight that verbs in theone form might be exchanged for theother form without confusing the ex-pression. One tense form of the vSem-itic verb denotes completed, and theother incomplete, action. Of the vastand varied modal development of theArvaii verbs the vSemitic language wasable to produce but little. Insteadthereof, the latter has produced peculiarconjugational forms indicative of thecharacter of the verbal action. vSome- 268 GREAT RACES OE MANKIND. times that action is transitive, some-times causal, or intensive, iterative,conative, reflexive, and the like. Asimple verb such as gat a la, he killed,becomes intensive when written or pro-nounced qattala, giving the meaning ofhe killed ivith •zw/tv/tY, or he nias- fragment in gives ingatala, with themeaning he killed hiinself. Thesestrange modal changes in the verb arecarried to a great degree. The modernArabic verb presents fifteen such varia-tions of verbal forms, and the greaterpart of these are in constant use. 4ft ^£:. SOLOMONS POOL.—Drawn by Paul Hardy, from a photograph. sacred. Again, by lengthening the firstvowel of qatala into gdtala, the mean-ing is no longer he killed, but hefnfd to kill. The transference of thefirst vowel to the position of a prefixgives agtala, meaning he caused tokill. The prefixing of the pronominal The next peculiarity of the Semiticlanguages is the absence of a neuter, orindeterminate, gender of the noun. Onlytwo genders, masculine and feminine,are recognized. The nouns have threenumbers, as already indicated, and thesequalities are carried into the verb. Of THE HEBRE WS.—LA NG UA GE. 269 case, there is hardly an indication in-S
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