August 12, 1879, Wednesday - Rudolph Falb, a German Professor, recently arrived in San Francisco, after spending two years in South America, and now on his way back to his native country, authorizes us to announce that he has made discoveries of great interest to ethnology and philology.

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A Philologist's Discoveries: Affinity of an Ancient South American Language to the Semitic Tongues

From the San Francisco Alta, Aug. 3

Rudolph Falb, a German Professor, recently arrived in San Francisco, after spending two years in South America, and now on his way back to his native country, authorizes us to announce that he has made discoveries of great interest to ethnology and philology. While in Bolivia, he studied the Aymara tongue which was in use before the Spanish conquest, and is older than the Quichna, which was spoken by the Incas and their subjects in Peru. This Aymara language, still spoken by 8,000,000 people of the aboriginal blood, bears an unmistakable and near affinity to the Semitic tongues, in which the radical form of every verd has three consonants.

The Arabic and the Hebrew are the leading languages in this class, and the relationship throughout. If this discovery should prove to be well founded it will have an immense influence on the opinions of the learned world. Some of the most interesting researches of the present century have been made in the same direction.

The discoveries that the Sanskrit, Hindostanee, Persian, Afghan, Armenian, Caucasian, Slavonic, Teutonic, Celtic, Latin, and Greek tongues all belong to the inflected class of languages; that many of their principal words, such as father, mother, brother, daughter, horse, ox, fire, sun, sky, light, dark, come, go, see, hear, eye, ear, hand, mouth, and so on, have similar sounds in these different tongues; and that ideas of later origin, connected with a high degree of civilization, such as pen, ink, paper, gun, pistol, and so on, are different - these discoveries have proved that the Aryan nations, as they are called, all sprang from a common stock in Central Asia, whence most of them migrated to Europe.

By examining the Sanskrit, the oldest of these tongues, and comparing it with the others, we can tell much of the intellectual, industrial, political, and social condition of the early progenitors of these people, which races first left the common stock, and how much progress was made before the separation. The word for daughter - differing little from the English and German words - in the Sanskrit means milkmaid, and therefore, while the ancestor of the Germans were still living with the ancestors of the Hindoos in Asia, they had cows.

By the same method of reasoning, we know that they had plows; that they had political rulers, military training, and so on. We know, further, that the people who speak the agglutinative languages, like Magyars, Turks, and Tartars, and the monosyllabe languages, like the Chinese, are of a different blood. Ethnologically, the Semitic races- the Phoenicians, Hebrews and Arabs - are clearly distinct from the agglutinative stock, but whether they are to be classed as belonging to the same blood with the Aryans, is a question about which philologist and ethnologists are not agreed.

If now the Aymara is a Semitic tongue, the learned world will have a hard task to determine whether Asia or South America was its original seat, and how the transfer was made without leaving any large mass of its active and imperious blood on the long road. Was the high plateau of South America the cradle of the Semitic, as that of Asia was the original home of the Aryan kindred? If we understand Prof. Falb correctly, he would answer that question in the affirmative; and if he establishes his point, we do not hesitate to say that he will take a place among the greatest discoverers and stimulators of thought and research in our age of unparalleled unapproached intellectual activity.

There may be no money in it, but there is an immense educating and refining influence in tracing back the history of man through the different steps of his natural progress from the lowest condition of savagism in the Stone Age, before he had yest learned to make metallic tools, to his present enlightment.

Four miles south of Lake Titicaca, 13,000 feet above the sea, in Bolivia, is the ruin of an Aymara temple with a large stone covered with carved hieroglyphs Prof. Falb claims to have interpreted, and he finds in them the proof that this temple was erected as a memorial of great flood. One of its principal figures contains Masonic signs, which mean the light, the thought, the word, the beginning; and the signification and history of these signs, after having been lost for thousands of years, are now again to be brought within the general comprehension. Figures, used as religious symbols in a very remote days, were preserved long after some of their meanings were forgotten. The philological world will look with interest for Prof. Falb's revelations.