Life of Ahmad — Page 440
MOTHER OF ALL LANGUAGES as 440 features have sometimes been preserved, they are no longer recognisable. ' Many attempts have also been made to establish a relationship between the different languages of the world. 'To some the possession in common grammatical gender, of the classification of objects in general as masculine and feminine, is of itself enough to prove such relationship. ' Many others compare the Semitic and Indo-European 'roots' with one another, and believe themselves to find there numerous indications of identity of material and signification. Peter Giles says: 'Till the latter part of the 18th century it was the universal practice to refer all languages ultimately to a Hebrew origin, because the language of the Bible was assumed, with reference to the early chapters of Genesis, to be the original language. ''And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech"' (Gen. 11:1). I cannot enter here into a philological controversy, but I may say that the Semitic languages are admittedly the languages of remotest antiquity. Doughty, Huber and Euting have discovered the Nabataean inscriptions which are dated from the 9th century B. C. The Greek alphabet is known to be derived from the Phoenician. Peter Giles says that wherever the alphabet may have originated there seems no doubt that its first importation in a form closely resembling that which we are familiar in modern times was from