Blair Collection > History of the Celtic language

Farkhurst and Calmet. He will supply no vowel
where no vowel is in the original: that would be
" adding to the words of this Book," and incurring
the curse.
With the Hebrew language, under that appella-
tion, he has no quarrel, being comparatively mo-
dern ; receiving its very name from Heber, the
great-grandson of Shem, who flourished somewhere
about two thousand years after the creation of
Adam, and, consequently, about two thousand
years after language had been ripening and flour-
ishing. Those who plead for it as being the
primitive language, under that name, give the lie,
innocently, perhaps, to their own belief of the
account of the confusion of the primitive tongue at
Babel; seeing, it is plain, that if the primordial lan-
guage were then and there confounded, it must have
been then and there lost; and how could Heber,
who flourished subsequently to that period, retain
it? Our belief is, that the Arabic, Phoenician,
Coptic, Cufic, Ethiopic, Chaldaic, Hebrew, Celtic,
Syriac, Nohic, Japhetic, and many more, were at
one period, with some slight dialectical diff"erence,
one and the same language, and that the primor-
dial one, in a more mature state. The very appella-