Perhaps one of the most remarkable characteristics of the Semitic family
of speech is its conservatism and resistance to change. As compared with
the other languages of the world, its grammar and vocabulary have alike
undergone but little alteration in the course of the centuries during
which we can trace its existence. The very words which were used by the
Babylonians four or five thousand years ago, can still be heard, with
the same meaning attached to them, in the streets of Cairo. _Kelb_ is
"dog" in modern Arabic as _kalbu_ was in ancient Babylonian, and the
modern Arabic _tayyîb_, "good," is the Babylonian _tâbu_. One of the
results of this unchangeableness of Semitic speech is the close
similarity and relationship that exist between the various languages
that represent it. They are dialects rather than distinct languages,
more closely resembling one another than is the case even with the
Romanic languages of modern Europe, which are descended from Latin.

Most of the Semitic languages--or dialects if we like so to call
them--are now dead, swallowed up by the Arabic of Mohammed and the
Qorân. The Assyrian which was spoken in Assyria and Babylonia is
extinct; so, too, are the Ethiopic of Abyssinia, and the Hebrew language
itself. What we term Hebrew was originally "the language of Canaan,"
spoken by the Semitic Canaanites long before the Israelitish conquest of
the country, and found as late as the Roman age on the monuments of
Phoenicia and Carthage. The Minæan and the Sabæan dialects of southern
Arabia still survive in modern forms; Arabic, which has now overflowed
the rest of the Semitic world, was the language of central Arabia alone.
In northern Arabia, as well as in Mesopotamia and Syria, Aramaic
dialects were used, the miserable relics of which are preserved to-day
among a few villagers of the Lebanon and Lake Urumîyeh. These Aramaic
dialects, it is now believed, arose from a mixture of Arabic with "the
language of Canaan."