1864.] 



On the Origin of the Hindvi Language. 



503 



> 



grammar is pure Bengali, but it contains no less than 35 per cent, of 

 foreign words. The Persian in the same way, though an Indo-Euro- 

 pean language, has received a large, accession of Semitic element from 

 the Arabs without in the least altering its grammar. Again the 

 Turks, though Turanian by birth, have a language which contains, 

 almost in equal proportion, vocables of Semitic Turanian and Aryan 

 origin. Its grammar nevertheless is purely Tartaric. According to 

 certain missionaries quoted by Hervas^ " the Araucans at one time 

 used hardly a single word which was not Spanish, though they pre- 

 served both the grammar and the syntax of their own native speech." 

 The English, however, offers the most remarkable instance of a lan- 

 guage borrowing its stock of words from a variety of foreign sources 

 without in the least altering its grammar. It is well known that in 

 England, for three centuries after the Norman conquest, the language 

 of court and law, and of elegance and fashion, was French, and nobody 

 was held respectable who did not speak in it. This led to the acces- 

 sion of a large stock of French words into the Saxon, generally esti- 

 mated at 17 or 18 per cent, and to such a change in the character of 

 the language of the metropolis, that Chaucer doubted that his poetry 

 would be intelligible out of London. But its grammar was left un- 

 touched. Omitting all mention of the other foreign elements, the 

 Hebrew, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Bengali, Hindustani, Malay and 

 Chinese words to be met with in English, I may observe that it has 

 been proved by Thommeral that of the total number of 43,566 words 

 in Webster's dictionary, no less than 29,853 come from classical and 

 only 13,230 from Teutonic sources. And yet the English is not a 

 classical but a Saxon language, and that because English can be writ- 

 ten with words entirely Anglo-Saxon, but never by Latin or French 

 words only. The Bengali of the Mofussil courts in the same way may 

 have 30 per cent, of foreign words, but those words by themselves 

 can never construct an intelligible sentence. Hence the great axiom 

 in the science of language " that grammar is the most essential 

 element, and therefore the ground of classification in all languages 

 which have produced a definite grammatical articulation. "f Applying 

 this rule to the Urdu, we find that in Hindvi there are several works 

 which contain but a small admixture of foreign element. Insha Alia 

 Khan wrote a tale in the so-called Urdu, which does not contain a 

 * Apud Max Mffller, Science of Language, p. 76. f Ma, Miller, loc. cit 



