Page:A Comparative Grammar of the Modern Aryan Languages of India Vol 1.djvu/62

40 in the course of this essay, in which we observe a regular gradation from west to east. In the extreme west we have Sindh and the Panjab, with a vast majority of Musulman inhabitants, and a large amount of Arabic words, contrasted with a very scanty allowance of Tatsamas. Going east we come into the great central Hindi area, where the balance between the two races is more even, the numerical superiority of the Hindus being balanced by the greater intelligence of the Muhammadans, and here we find consequently the habit of borrowing from Persian kept up side by side with recurrence to Sanskrit, such recurrence, however, being less frequent in consequence of the already existing abundance of Tadbhava words. Further east again, in Bengal and Orissa, there is an immense majority of Hindus, and as a natural result a maximum of Tatsamas. In this scheme, Gujarati and Marathi stand nearly in the same place as Hindi, the former being rather more Persian, and the latter rather more Sanskritic than it. The whole seven languages may be thus grouped, the left hand indicating the Arabic pole so to speak, and the right hand the Sanskrit, and the position of the languages on the page their degree of proximity to the respective poles.

With regard to the Arabic and Persian element, however, it must be observed that in all the languages it is still an alien. It has not woven itself into the grammar of any of them. All the Arabic words in Hindi or any other language are nouns, or participial forms used as nouns. They conform to their own grammatical rules as strictly in the mouth of a correct speaker, as though the rest of the sentence were pure Arabic. Rarely, and quite exceptionally, occur such words as taḥsîlnâ, ḳabûlnâ,