difficulty he reached home. I felt like sitting at his feet; such a faithful martyr for Jesus I had never before seen.

Messrs. Moffett and McKenzie started Friday from Seoul as a relief party; travelling day and night they reached us the following Tuesday. A week later Dr. Scranton arrived. He and Mr. McKenzie returned the next week.

We remained in Pyong-yang a month after the difficulty arose, treating patients daily, both myself and Mrs. Hall; we had from twenty to thirty a day. We held services Sundays and every night. Our last Sunday there I had twenty men, and Mrs. Hall had seven women at the service. The interest in Christianity is deepening. God is removing the obstacles and clearing away the rubbish for a harvest of souls in Pyong-yang.

The people as a rule are friendly toward us. The instigators of the trouble were some of the officials and their servants. There has just been secured through the foreign office an order demanding the restoration of the money extorted from those who were in prison and the punishment of the guilty parties. On the vessel upon which we returned there were 400 Pyong-yang soldiers, and when we reached Chemulpo we found thirteen gun-boats in the harbor, mostly Japanese and Chinese. Trouble is threatening between China and Japan, and there is strong probability of their using Korea as their battle-ground. What the outcome will be we do not know. We are looking forward to that glad day when the nations of the earth shall learn war no more.

Light thrown on Bible Study from the Languages of Eastern Asia.

BY J. EDKINS, D.D.

F we call the Tartar, Dravidian and Japanese languages the languages of Eastern Asia, we class together idioms which are quite sufficiently alike to form one distinct family. It consists of more than one hundred millions of people at the present time. The Japanese nearly touch forty millions under recently improved government. The Dravidian races ruled by England are fast approaching fifty millions in South India. The Turks touch on the Semitic area along an extended frontier and themselves govern many Semites. Then there are the Mongols, Buriats and Tungous tribes throughout Chinese Tartary, Siberia and Russia with the Fins and Hans. The Chinese number 380 millions, if we follow the imperial census, and have a monosyllabic language which looks remarkably

primitive. In China 1200 or 1300 Protestant missionaries are now preaching the Gospel or teaching it in classes or learning to do so. There are probably half this number of missionaries of the Roman Catholic persuasion. There is a proportionate number of Christian missionaries labouring in the Turanian countries.

I suggest for consideration that as the study of Hebrew in the Old Testament is of immense importance and spreading rapidly in connection with Bible study in various countries, attention should be directed to the similarities and contrasts of Semitic and Eastern Asiatic grammar and of Semitic and Chinese grammar with a view to improve our understanding of Hebrew idiom and prepare us to decide whether, after all the controversy that has been held, the whole of the Asiatic population are not of one language and of one speech.

Independently of this question of supreme interest looming up in the back ground and waiting impatiently for a solution there is that other question whether by the study of these languages we may not better comprehend Old Testament idiom. This is my contention in the present paper. My object is simply to shew that from a Chinese and Tartar standpoint, when engaged in making grammar, we can mark the workings of the Semitic mind under very favourable auspices, and see better the processes of gradual growth by which Semitic speech became what it now is.

It should not be forgotten that a large number of valuable versions of the Sacred Scriptures have been made by the Protestant missionaries and printed by the Bible societies from funds contributed by God-fearing people. These many Bibles and Testaments are all sold at moderate prices. Many of them are printed in Roman type. To read others new modes of writing have to be learned. The Bible is the best of all books for philological research in all languages, because it contains philosophy and the language of common life, poetry, history and divinity mixed together in proportions suited to the philologist's purpose.

It ought not to be supposed that Semitic grammar, for example, cannot be illustrated from Mongol or from Chinese. Tradition with religious and political usages indicate that these nations are not now where they were at first. Once they might be neighbours, though now far removed.

To limit my field I take the laws by which sentences are concatenated and say nothing of roots and their truly remarkable similarities. In the original speech of mankind sentences were

*In the Mongol Bible shar is ox and in the Hebrew it is shor. The Mongol for fish is jagas; in Hebrew it is dag; in Japanese sakana. The Mongol and Japanese have sibilated the initial by a law just as certain as that which has changed dies into jour in modern French.

isolated and came one by one from the lips of the speaker. Logical concatenation of sentences came into grammar in a later age. The circumstantial clause means the subordinate clause. Subordination came out of co-ordination. The exigencies of speech compel some sentences to become subordinate to others. Emphasis entered as an important factor in the realistic speech of our earliest forefathers. Eagerness on the part of the speaker expressed itself in emphasis on certain sentences. Just as in any modern sentence emphasis is placed on some words, so it was in primitive times with words and with sentences. In every sentence there are principal and subordinate words. In every concatenation of sentences there are principal and subordinate clauses. In other words, these are distinguished as emphatic and not emphatic.

Language was at first entirely realistic without formative words. The formative words of every grammatical system are produced by the fading process, which causes the proper significance of roots to disappear and leaves them at the disposal of the language maker for some grammatical use. Roots became formative over a small local area and gradually were adopted more widely. People adopted them by imitation without thinking of their original meaning. The realistic value vanished. The formative value was maintained. So it was that language when it came into the hands of the schoolmaster to teach consisted half of roots and half of forms. Grammar classifies the forms and lexicology arranges the roots in alphabetical order. This was what the school-master did long ago with Hebrew in the Syrian and Spanish synagogues where he taught his pupils.

The circumstantial clause ceased at some date in the progress of language to be strictly co-ordinate on equal terms with the principal clause. The listener heard it pronounced with less emphasis than some other clause. If he belonged to that portion of the world's population which became Chinese and Turanian he learned to put the emphatic clause last and the unemphatic clauses before it. A man with a strong will began this mode of speech and his fellow-tribesmen imitated him. In Chinese and all Turanian languages this law holds. It is an idiotism now in use among 500 millions of people on the Asiatic continent and in Japan. Is it likely that this law has had no effect on Hebrew grammar? The Chinese and Tartar types are peculiarly old, older indeed than either the Semitic or the Indo-European. The Semitic, by the triliteral form of its words, is known to be of posterior origin. The IndoEuropean has been modernized in every department by the growing intellect of recent times. In the history of the Semitic grammar the investigation must embrace Chinese and Turanian influences before it can be completed.

In reading in Dr. Driver's Hebrew Tenses the appendix on circumstantial clauses it struck me that it would be well to examine some of the examples he gives from the Hebrew Bible and compare them with those found in the Septuagint, in the Mongol Bible and in the Chinese Bible, in order to learn what results might be obtained from observing the way in which the circumstantial clause is expressed in versions representing such very old types of language.

Dr. Driver has compared the Hebrew syntax with that of Greek, Latin and English, but as there are principles of syntax in the Hebrew Bible which Hebrew has in common with European tongues so there are also principles which it has in common with Tartar tongues and with Japanese. It also has its own idiotisms.

That Hebrew syntax is old as a type compared with the modern European tongues and with ancient Greek and Latin is to be concluded from the remarkable inversions of order which it presents if judged by European syntax as a standard. The Hebrew syntax is marked by great vivacity. The verb loves the first place and the adjective loves to follow its noun, that is to say, the action precedes the actor and the thing which has a certain quality precedes the quality. A love for realism is here seen.

The sentence "and William wrote the letter" becomes in Hebrew "and wrote William the letter." This is a Semitic idiotism, and cannot be primeval. The Chinese and English agree, but the Chinese would not place "and" at the beginning of a sentence. It is a copulative conjunction and must have a nominative before it.

When Dr. Driver says, "The clauses in a complete sentence take the form in Hebrew, more than in many other languages, of simple co-ordination," it is the principle of agglutination of which he is speaking, that is, the agglutination of sentences. The logical relation of the clauses to each other is not indicated by special symbols but is left to be inferred by the reader. The Indo-European idiom is more cultivated and modern. The Hebrew is more primitive. Logical relationship is only marked out by suitable forms after long effort and after extended pædagogical culture. Dr. Driver points out that where Hebrew agglutinates the circumstantial clause modern idiom usually marks it more distinctly.† The ablative and genitive absolute are modern devices which were preceded by the various modes of simple agglutination.

For example, in I Kings xix, 19, "And he went thence and found Elisha, and he (was) ploughing," vehu horesh, 177. The Hebrew introduces the circumstantial clause by the use of a conjunction. The Septuagint has καὶ αὐτὸς ἠροτρια ἐν βουσὶ. The

** Appendix 1, 157.

† Page 225.

author, speaking Greek, preferred to use an aorist indicative verb. Immediately afterwards he says, δώδεκα ζεύγη ἐνώπιον αὐτοῦ και αὐτὸς Ev Tоiç dúdεka. Twelve yokes before him and he with the twelfth. He says with the twelve, but meaning probably the twelfth. The Greek and Hebrew agglutinate the clause "twelve yoke before him" without a conjunction or verb. The A. V. inserts with and the R. V. with. The Latin has Elias reperit Elisaeum arantem in duodecim jugis boum. Duodecim paria erant ante eum, et ipseunus erat.* It is remarkable here to notice the modern spirit which fills all vacancies in grammar to suit the European mind. The form of arantem, the insertion of erant, a new commencement after boum, all shew that this version was made when grammar was taught in schools. It was not so with the writer in the Septuagint, who spoke a Greek mixed with much Semitism, which his school-masters were well content he should use.

The Chinese is, Elijah then went, met Shafa's son Elisha ploughing land, oxen twelve yoke; the hindmost Elisha himself drove.

Let it be noted that the subject is always first, then the transitive or intransitive verb, and then the object, if the verb be transitive. No connective is required between went and met. The word ploughing follows the word Elisha as arantem in the Latin. Land is inserted to help the verb to maintain a transitive character. The twelfth becomes "hindmost" to avoid repetition, and here the Chinese writer is allowed by the foreign translator to gratify his taste by avoiding tautology.

The Mongol is, This upon Elijah he thence going Shafat's Elisha son found. He ten-two pair ox with, land ploughing, the cwelfth (lit. ten second) before was.

There are two verbs in the indicative, "found "and "was." By Turanian law (not Chinese) † they must stand last in the sentence. Circumstantial clauses. are terminated by gerunds "going," "ploughing."

The Tartar syntax differs from that of Chinese by placing the verb after its object.

Dr. Driver has conferred, as has been fully recognized, a singular benefit on students of Hebrew by illustrating its syntax with examples taken from European syntax, which is modern. I suggest that the study of comparative syntax should also be prosecuted in the region of linguistic types still older than either the Indo-European or the Semitic; types belonging to the region of pure agglutination, out of which Semitism first emerged and then * Pool's Synopsis.

† In Chinese the place of the verb is between the subject and object.