A literary history of Persia

HUZVARISH 73more as to the essential peculiarity of Pahlawi to which wehave already repeatedly alluded, namely,its Huzvdrish orZavdrishnelement of Aramaic words more or less defaced inthe addition of Persian inflexional terminationsmany cases byand " phonetic complements." When a Pahlawi text is read, alarge proportion of the words itcomposing are found to beSemitic, not Iranian, and, to be more precise, to be drawnfrom an Aramaic dialect closely akin to Syriac and Chaldaean.Now since an ordinary modern Persian text also contains alarge proportion of Semitic (in thiscase Arabic) words, whichare actuallyread as they are written, and are, in fact, foreignwords as completely incorporated in Persian as are the Greek,Latin, French, and other exotic words which together constituteso largea portion of the modern English vocabulary inour own language,it was at firstthought that the Aramaicelement in Pahlawi was wholly comparable to the Arabicelement in modern Persian. But a more careful examinationshowed that there was an essential difference between the twocases. However extensively one language may borrow fromanother, there is a limit which cannot be exceeded. It wouldbe easy to pick out sentences of modern Persian written in thehigh-flown style of certain ornate writers in which all thesubstantives, all the adjectives, and all the verbal nouns wereArabic, and in which, moreover, Arabic citations and phrasesabounded ; yet the general structure of the sentence, thepronouns, and the auxiliary verbs would and must continue tobe Persian. Similarly in a sentence like " I regard this expressionof opinion as dangerous," only four of the eight wordsemployed are really of English descent, yetthe sentence isthoroughly English, and it is inconceivable that the pronouns"I "and "this," or the particles "of" and "as," should bereplaced by equivalents of foreign extraction.In Pahlawi, however,the case is quite different. Haug goes, perhaps, a trifletoo far when he says (Essay on Pahlawi^ pp. 120-121) "all thecase-signs and even the plural suffixes in the nouns ; all the