1S66.] The Arabic Element in Official Hindustani. 9 



and extraordinary in degree. An immediate consequence of the 

 foreign conquests achieved by the Arabs under Muhammad's first four 

 successors, was an extensive corruption of their language : for the 

 nations that they subdued were naturally obliged to adopt, in a great 

 measure, the speech of the conquerors, a speech which few persons have 

 ever acquired in such a degree as to be secure from the commission 

 of frequent errors in grammar, without learning it from infancy. 

 These nations, therefore, and the Arabs dwelling among them, con- 

 curred in forming a simplified dialect, chiefly by neglecting to observe 

 those inflections and grammatical rules which constitute the greatest 

 difficulty of the classical Arabic." (Lane's Arabic Dictionary. Pre- 

 face ; p. vii. London, 1863.) 



The inference I draw from the above remarks is, that we have no 

 right to compare the Arabic used in modern Hindustani with the 

 Arabic of classical writers, and to condemn it, if it does not agree with 

 theirs. Still less have we any right to compare it with the elaborate 

 Arabic of the grammarians. The Indo- Arabic of the present day is 

 the legitimate descendant of the Arabic brought into India by the 

 early conquerors, and we may safely give them credit for having spoken 

 their own language correctly, even though that language was not pre- 

 cisely the same as that spoken by Muhammad and his tribesmen. 

 When Abu Bakr raised the standard of Islam and sent out the armies 

 of the faithful to the conquest of Syria, warriors from Yaman and 

 Hadramaut joined his troops. These must have spoken Himyaritie 

 dialects, differing widely from the dialects of Mecca and Medina. 

 Bar-Hebrous, in his Syriac " History of the dynasties," speaks of the 

 Arabs always as " Tayoye," or men of the tribe of Tai, whose dialect 

 differed considerably, not only in the use of words, but in grammatical 

 forms, from the literary standard of Arabic. 



Moawuja's army was composed almost entirely of Syrians ; and the 

 Arab troops which conquered Persia were largely composed of the 

 same semi-foreign element. There is thus ample ground for supposing 

 that the form of Arabic which the conquering troops of El Islam 

 brought with them into Persia, and which so powerfully influenced 

 that language, was not the form which is reproduced in the Kuran 

 and in the classical works of western and central Arabia. Here again 

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