There remains, therefore, the first or isolating stage only in which Semitic and Aryan speech might have been identical. But even here we must make a distinction. All Aryan roots are monosyllabic, all Semitic roots have been raised to triliteral form. Therefore it is only previous to the time when the Semitic roots assumed this secondary triliteral form that any community could possibly be admitted between these two streams of language. Supposing we knew as an historical fact that at this early period--a period which transcends the limits of everything we are accustomed to call historical--Semitic and Aryan speech had been identical, what evidence of this union could we expect to find in the actual Semitic and Aryan languages such as we know them in their inflectional period? Let us recollect that the 100,000 words of English, nay, the many hundred thousand words in all the dictionaries of the other Aryan languages, have been reduced to about 500 roots, and that this small number of roots admits of still further reduction. Let us, then, bear in mind that the same holds good with regard to the Semitic languages, particularly if we accept the reduction of all triliteral to biliteral roots. What, then, could we expect in our comparison of Hebrew and Sanskrit but a small number of radical coincidences, a similarity in the form and meaning of about 500 radical syllables, everything else in Hebrew and Sanskrit being an after-growth, which could not begin before the two branches of speech were severed once and forever. But more, if we look at these roots we shall find that their predicative power is throughout very general, and therefore liable to an infinite amount of specification. A root that means to fall (Sk. +pat+, πί-πτ-ω) comes to mean to fly (Sk. +ut-pat+, πέτομαι). The root +dâ+, which means to give, assumes, after the preposition â, the sense of taking. The root +yu+, which means to join, means to separate if preceded by the preposition +vi+. The root +ghar+, which expresses brightness, may supply, and does supply in different Aryan languages, derivations expressive of brightness (gleam), warmth (Sk. +gharma+, heat), joy (χαίρειν), love (χάρις), of the colors of green (Sk. +hari+), yellow (_gilvus_, _flavus_), and red (Sk. +harit+, _fulvus_), and of the conception of growing (_ger-men_). In the Semitic languages this vagueness of meaning in the radical elements forms one of the principal difficulties of the student, for according as a root is used in its different conjugations, it may convey the most startling variety of conception. It is also to be taken into account that out of the very limited number of roots which at that early time were used in common by the ancestors of the Aryan and Semitic races, a certain portion may have been lost by each, so that the fact that there are roots in Hebrew of which no trace exists in Sanskrit, and _vice versâ_, would again be perfectly natural and intelligible.