The Arabic Element in Official Hiudustani. [No. 1 



Zuruchziehen, to retract, withdraw ; " withdraw" is formed from 

 our own Teutonic stores. 



The fact is that in making compound words, the English has the 

 advantage of using the short and expressive Latin prefixes, pro, re, 

 con, per, in ; whereas the German, rejecting these commodious 

 foreigners, has to fall back on the unwieldy natives ; Wieder, zusam- 

 men, zuruck 7 wider, heraus, &c. The result is that its compounds are 

 of uncomfortable length, and are rather circumlocutions than direct 

 expressions of the idea involved. 



Turning now to Hindustani for Teutonic, let us put Indian as ex- 

 pressing the class of languages from which the old Hindi Bhashas are 

 derived and for Latin or Romance let us put Semitic. Then the pro- 

 position I would maintain stands thus : The Hindustani language 

 meets the requirements of civilization better by borrowing freely from 

 Semitic sources than by forming words and compounds from Indian 

 sources. 



To borrow a metaphor from Botany, the Semitic languages are en- 

 dogenous, the Indo- Germanic exogenous. The former grow by addi- 

 tions from within, the latter by accretions from without. 



Accretions, it is evident, are limited solely by their power of adher- 

 ing to the original trunk. Or perhaps it would be better to say accre - 

 tions may be multiplied up to the sustaining limit of the parent stem. 



Endogenous growth on the other hand is limited by the space it can 

 squeeze out for itself in the enciente of the older formations. With a 

 strong parent stem like German or Sanskrit, accretive compounds may 

 be formed almost without limit. Sanskrit thinks nothing of a twenty- 

 syllabled compound, and a word like ' herausbekommen' is as nothing 

 to German organs. In Arabic, and Hebrew, on the contrary there is 

 the triliteral root, which may be made to evolve many dozens of new 

 words, but all within the limits of the three radical letters aided by a 

 handful of serviles. The result is that the Semitic languages can ex- 

 press more in a small compass than the Indo- Germanic can. A pre- 

 fixed alif or mini will often have as much power as ' con' ' pro' ' re' 

 or half a dozen Latin or Greek words strung together ; thus from 

 nazara to see, the simple lengthening of a vowel gives us " nazir," 

 a word, the technical and ordinary meaning of which, cannot be ex- 

 pressed in any Indo- Germanic language without a compound, e. g. 



