8 The Arabic Element in Official Hindustani. [No. 1, 



of feelings and passions which constitutes the temperament of a human 

 being; in other words, his 'disposition.' Istimzdj is used by our 

 Hindustani writers to signify, " wishing to know what the sentiments 

 of a person (iriizaj) are on a certain point," i. e., asking for permission. 

 In other words, the noun mize'tj is taken as the root from which a sort 

 of denominative verb in the tenth conjugation is formed istamzdja, and 

 from this again a regular verbal noun istimzdj is formed. Now I ad- 

 mit that such a process is not found to exist in Arabic with regard to 

 this verb, but such a process is found with regard to other words ; and 

 we do not know enough of the state of the various dialects of Arabic 

 in the thirteenth century to be able to affirm that such a word may 

 not have been used in some of them ; and that it may not have been 

 brought into India by some of the " mixed multitude," who accom- 

 panied the earlier Musalman invaders. "We have no right to suppose 

 that those writers who, three or four centuries ago, created the Urdu 

 tongue, borrowed their Arabic solely from the classical dialect of the 

 Kuran. So far was the Kuran from being written in the ordinary 

 colloquial style, that we know Muhammad himself was in the habit of 

 pointing to it as one of his greatest miracles, and that the unapproach- 

 able purity of its diction is to the present day a subject of admiration 

 to all the faithful. The conversazione of Hariri again, from which so 

 many of our European scholars draw their ideas of Arabic, is a profess- 

 edly pedantic work, and it is never pretended that the ordinary Arab 

 of the period talked in such elaborate strains. We must seek for the 

 origin of many of our modern Indo-Arabic words in the language of 

 the lower class of which, to this day, we know next to nothing. That 

 the language of the towns even in Muhammad's time had lost much of 

 its early purity is shewn, inter alia, by the customs of the townsmen 

 ■of sending their children into the desert to learn from the mouths of 

 the Badawin the unadulterated tongue. The prophet himself is said, 

 in this way, to have spent some years among the tribe of Saad a branch 

 of the Kuraysh. 



After the death of Muhammad the decay of the spoken language 

 was very rapid. One of the latest and best authorities on this sub- 

 ject says ; " Every language without a written literature tends to decay 

 more than to development by reason of foreign influences ; and the 

 history of the Arabic exhibits an instance of decay remarkably rapid 



