ABSTRACT
If the survival, for which the authors look, would be a miracle, equally, Semitic, in its unique constancy, is a miracle. In fact, the Semitic languages show unmistakable evidence of this origin of language. It might seem likely they cannot tell that they should find the clearest evidences of the origin of speech near the areas where man arose. They inferred from the many languages that they examined that the roots and the earliest words consisted in the main of a succession of consonant and the vowel A, and they saw the same phenomenon in the Semitic radicals. They have seen some of the reasons why this is so, and why Semitic has resisted change. Their purpose is different - namely, to search for the shorter, mainly biliteral, roots which they find in the bulk of the world's languages and the speech of children, and which they have concluded to be the forms of man's earliest words.
