HISTORY OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE 217 



as it is an outcome of an entirely unnatural tendency to conceal the 

 history and development of some two thousand years. Spoken 

 Modern Greek presents a combination of the two phenomena, sim- 

 plification of grammar and a great influx of foreign words. 1 So does 

 Modern Persian too; its accidence is extremely simple and in so 

 many respects resembles English that Misteli consecrates the last 

 sections of his great work to a comparison of the two languages in 

 their present shapes. 2 Persian also in that respect resembles English, 

 that it is full of loan-words, nearly all expressions for philosophical, 

 abstract, and technical ideas being Arabic words. But just as most 

 of the philosophical, abstract, and technical Latin and Greek words 

 were adopted into English after the process of grammatical simplifi- 

 cation had been carried very far, in the same manner Arabic influence 

 in Persian follows, instead of preceding, the doing away with most 

 of the old complexity of grammar. Pehlevi, or the language of the 

 Sassanid period, before the Arabic conquest, is far simpler than Old 

 Persian. If, then, the Persian simplicity is a consequence of speech- 

 mixture, it must be one of earlier date, and perhaps the Aramaic 

 influence on Pehlevi is strong enough to account for everything; 

 that, however, must be left for specialists to decide. 



In India, the old system of inflections has broken down in the 

 modern languages, which are all more or less analytic in their struc- 

 ture. Hindi seems to have gained much in simplicity as early as the 

 thirteenth century, although the modern system of auxiliary verbs 

 and of postpositions was not then fully established, but the strong 

 influx of Persian (with Arabic and Turkish) words did not begin till 

 some centuries later. Hindustani is practically the same language 

 as Hindi with still more foreignisms in it. Gujarati has preserved 

 more of the old inflections than Hindi, but the Persian elements are 

 rather more numerous here than in Hindi. 



We should not leave the Arian (Indo-European) languages without 

 mentioning the numerous varieties of Creole languages that have 

 sprung up in all those parts of the globe where Europeans have been 

 in constant communication with native populations of different 

 races. Grammatical simplicity has in all these languages been carried 

 extremely far, and though the actual admixture of exotic words is very 

 unequal and inconstant, varying as it does, according to circumstances 

 and individuals, still it is always pretty considerable. 3 



Outside the Indo-European languages, the nearest in kin are 

 probably the Finno-Ugrian group. The absence of old documents 



1 See on the relation between the two things especially K. Krumbacher, Das 

 problem der neugriechischen schriftsprache. Festrede in der kgl. bayr. akademie der 

 wissenschaften in Miinchen. 1902. 



2 F. Misteli, Charakteristik der hauptsachlichsten typen des sprachbaues. Berlin, 

 1893. 



8 See H. Schuchardt, Kreolische studien, Wiener akademie, 1883 ff. 



