those of the Thessalians; and that the PeneuS in Thessaly
sometimes bore the name of Araxes.vStrabo, seerus,how-
ever, to have given more credit to a notion that the Armenians
were of one race with the Arabs and the Aramaeans or
Syrians: as an argument he appeals to the resemblance of
names, but adds a remark which if well founded wouldbave
afforded much better evidence. He says*“ that the Armenians,
Arabs and Aramaeans resemble each other much in
their dialect, in their manner of living, and ^,n their physical;
characters.” In the former of these particulars StrabomUSt
have been mistaken, since the language which is preserved
to us in the version, of the scriptures and in other books from
the time- of Mesrop, has no affinity to the Syro-Arabian
idioms, .Herodotus obtained a different account of the Armenians,
which is probably nearer to the truth. He declares
that they w'eréa colony of Phrygians, and,that being armed
like* the Phrygians, the Armenian troops accompanied the
Phrygian subjects of the great king.under a .common Jea^m:
in the expedition into Greece. The Phrygian language is
supposed to have been an Indo-European dialect. Sqch
we have seen was the Armenian. It is singular that this
language should have been set down by the learned authors
of the Mithridates, as one altogether, peculiar and fundamentally
distinct from all others, .especially asihe^imerals
and the words of common use to whichjthey advert., betray
an evident affinity to the Indo-European, languages. This
mistake has not escaped M. Klaproth, who neYcr let pass
an opportunity of speaking contemptuously of his predecessors
or even of his contemporaries. Klaproth has
displayed the verbal connexion of the Armenian and Indo-?
European idioms in a vocabulary occupying sixtyiseven
columns of his quarto “ Asia Polyglotta,” written down
according to the pronunciation of an Armenian of Constantinople^
In this a great proportion; of the words
resemble, as may be supposed, the Persian and Kurdish
vocabularies, and a considerable number have analogues
in the more remote Indo-European languages. There are
also some Turkish and Siberian words, belonging to the
modern Armenian, which is much corrupted from similar
sources, and differs considerably from the pure old Armenian
^s?pe^eh; But as this subject is of primary importance
in supplying' the ^d^litiiency^^f information in respect to
the ethnology of the Armenian people, I shall take the
liberty exciting' at full length the observations of Professor
Neumann.
. *“,~The old - speech of the sons of Haïk,” says this able
writer, “ is a member of the widely-dispersed Indo-German,
or as it might rather be called, Arian family of languages.
In its roots it has much-resemblance to the dialects? of the
Median and Persian province's, but i é grammatical forma-
tion exhibits many phenomena entirely peculiar to it, which
may in soine.t. instances -be' explained ,by the remarkable
nature of the Armenian alphhbëfi One Of the habitudes.of
this language is the use of k as a termination of the plural
both in nouns substantive, and: in numerals- This is
probably a/transitibn of thé s of cognate dialects and languages
into k, which is the reverse of tiie change often ocr
curringin the?Slavish, of Tt Into**. Andrew Akoluth, whom
we'shall again'have ^occasion to, mén tion when considering
the efforts made by Europeans to extend the knowledge of
the-Armenian-language and literature, maintains that the
Armenian is one with the ancient Egyptian and the modern
Coptic, a fact which Leibnitz long ago with good reason
doubted. Johann Joachim Schrseder in vain attempted .to
give it the rank of- a principal mother tongue. La Croze
seems to* have come tolerably near to the truth :! he maintained
that it is, in-the proper sense of the term, the language
of the ancient Medes. This is not strictly the fact:
the Armenian language belongs in reality, as we have said,
by the evidence of many of its roots, to the old Medo-
Persian family of languages, so that most of the Median
words preserved by Herodotus can be explained by means
of the Armenian.