change can do duty for any part of speech.  There is no sign of case or number:  all has been reduced to an absolute simplicity, beyond which there is no going.  Words can end with no consonant but the most rounded of all, the nasal liquids n and ng. There is about as much likeness to the Aryan and Semitic languages—­you can trace about as much analogy between them—­as you can between a centipede and a billiard-ball.

There are definite laws governing the changes of language.  You know how the Latin castrum became in English ciaster and then chester; the change was governed by law.  The same law makes our present-day vulgar say cyar for car; that word, in the American of the future, will be something like chair.  The same law makes the same kind of people say donchyer for don’t you; some day, alas! even that will be classical and refined American.  Well; we know that that law has been at work in historic times even on the Chinese billiard-ball:  where Confucius said Ts’in like a gentleman, the late Yuan Shi Kai used to say Ch’in. So did the Dowager Empress; it was eminently the refined thing to do.  So we ourselves have turned Ts’in into China.—­And that is the one little fact—­or perhaps one of the two or three little facts—­that remain to convince us that Chinese and its group of kindred languages grew up on the same planet, and among the same humankind, that produced Sanskrit and Latin.

But does not that suggest also the possibility that Alpine Aryan might some day—­after millions of years—­wear down or evolve back even into billiard-ball Chinese?  That human language is one thing; and all the differences, the changes rung on that according to the stages of evolution?

In the Aryan group of languages, the bond of affinity is easily recognisable:  the roots of the words are the same:  Pitri, pater, vater, are clearly but varying pronunciations of the same word.  In the Turanic group, however—­Finnish, Hungarian, Turkish, Tatar, Mongol and Manchu—­you must expect no such well-advertised first-cousinship.  They are grouped together, not because of any likeness of roots:  not because you could find one single consonant the same in the Lappish or Hungarian, say, and in the Mongol or Manchu words for father—­you probably could not;—­but because there may be syntactical likenesses, or the changes and assimilations of sounds may be governed by the same laws.  Thus in Turkic—­I draw upon the Encyclopaedia Britannica—­there is a suffix z, preceded by a vowel, to mean your:  pederin is ‘father’; ‘your father’ becomes pederiniz; dostun means ‘friend’; ‘your friend’ becomes not dostuniz, but dostunus; and this trick of assimilating the vowel of the suffix is the last one in the stem is an example of the kind of similarities which establish the relationship of