out, and several other lan-guages would be affected to a great degree.

The languages that would be doomed to immediate death if the use of Arabic words were banned

are Urdu, Sindi, and Pashto. For of every hundred words used in elevated Urdu poetry there are some twenty words either Arabic or Persian, and this number may rise to 50 or 60 in the writing of prose that is not elevated. This holds generally of the Sindi language as well, which preserves to this very day the old Arabic Naskh script. The people of Sind use pure Arabic words to denote everyday things: they apply the word jabal, for example, to a hill, and they use other Arabic words for common objects, among them the words for the onion and the egg. The Pashto language, too, has adopted a great number of Arabic words, and its speakers — the people of Afghanistan and the people of the North-West Frontier Province of India — use the Arabic Nastaliq script. Most of the Arabic words used in Urdu are used in Pashto as well.

The important regional lan-guages, such as Bengali, Gujarati, and Marathi, draw most of their vocabulary from Sanskrit, yet they contain no small quantity of Arabic words, most of them expressions connected with the laws and the Islamic religion, such as the following: Allah, rasul, imam, hajj, zakat, iftar, du'a, khayrat, janna, jahannam, etc. — words known and familiar in every province inhabited by Muslims. Among the many legal expressions used in Bengali, Gujarati, and Marathi, with slight modifications, are the following words: na'ib, zawja, sakin, da'ir, wakil, 'adala, munsif, hakim, muharrir, 'ardi, rida, istimrari, etc. It is worth mentioning that the use of these words is not confined to the educated

few: the illiterate peasants of the remote districts use them in their daily talk. But Arabic has played a great role in increasing the wealth of the Urdu language and strengthening it — the language written in the Arabic Nastaliq script and spoken by some 80 million souls in the Punjab, Delhi, Bihar, Kashmir, Hyderabad, and other parts of India. It is the language of instruction in at least one university, namely the Osmania University in Hyderabad. This language employs, in the hundreds of newspapers and magazines edited in it, and in the great number of literary and scientific works, all the technical terms taken from the Arabic lan-guage. In the science of law, for instance, Arabic terms prevail — so much so that one is delightedly astonished to hear the illiterate peasants of the Punjab, Delhi, and Bihar, where Urdu is used in the courts, uttering pure Arabic words such as: da'wa, istighatha, mudda'i, mudda'a alayhi, mulzam, shahadat, manqula, fard ahkam (that is, the copy of the judgment), fard jurm (that is, the bill of indictment), iqbal (that is, confession), inkar, 'unwan, daf'a (that is, section), etc. And there are no fewer than a thousand Arabic terms used in the legal documents alone. There are also hundreds of Arabic words that have lost their original Arabic meanings and come to be used in other senses, their very forms so much changed that neither the Indian nor the Arab can distin-guish them and know them to be of Arabic origin. In other words, they have become (mustahnada), just as we say musta'raba. The Arabic word wajh, for example, is pronounced wajba in Urdu, and its meaning there is (reason). The word asbab — whose singular in Arabic is sabab, literally meaning a rope — came

to be used in the philosophical sense, and its use in that sense became widespread in the Arabic language; in Urdu, however, it is used for baggage. Here follows a list of some current examples:

Urdu / Its Arabic meaning / Its Urdu meaning naqd / verifying the soundness of a thing / money matin / able to bear weight / respected, of good character madhaq / taste / a joke, humor shakil / of the same kind / beautiful manzur / that which is seen / accepted dimagh / mind / pride

When writers in the Urdu lan-guage were obliged to compose scientific and technical works, or to translate them from foreign languages, the wealth and fertil-ity of the Arabic language led them to take most of their tech-nical and scientific terms from that language. The names of all the modern sciences accordingly became Arabic: people used the word siyasiyat for the political sciences, iqtisadiyat for the eco-nomic sciences, nafsiyat for the science of psychology, tibb for the science of medicine, a'sabat for the science of the nerves, madaniyat for the science of civic principles, and mantiq for the sci-ence of logic, and so on through the rest of the names of the sciences. All the modern scientific instruments are called by purely Arabic names: the thermometer, for instance, is called the instru-ment of the measure of heat, and the loudspeaker the instrument of the spreading of sound. Among the reasons that have made Urdu indebted to Arabic for this quan-tity of words is, first, that these two languages are close to each other phonetically; and second, that Arabic is one of the living languages, digesting the Western sciences rapidly and thereby furnishing a suitable fund of the