Mohammed was Arabic, a branch of the Semitic family,
closely allied to Hebrew and Syriac. Together with the Koran, and their
law and religion, the Turks learned from the Arabs, their conquerors, many
of the arts and sciences connected with a more advanced stage of
civilization. Arabic became to the Turks what Latin was to the Germans
during the Middle Ages; and there is hardly a word in the higher
intellectual terminology of Arabic, that might not be used, more or less
naturally, by a writer in Turkish. But the Arabs, again, at the very
outset of their career of conquest and conversion, had been, in science,
art, literature, and polite manners, the pupils of the Persians, whom they
had conquered; they stood to them in the same relation as the Romans stood
to the Greeks. Now, the Persians speak a language which is neither
Semitic, like Arabic, nor Turanian, like Turkish; it is a branch of the
Indo-European or Aryan family of speech. A large infusion of Persian words
thus found its way into Arabic, and through Arabic into Turkish; and the
result is that at the present moment the Turkish language, as spoken by
the higher ranks at Constantinople, is so entirely overgrown with Persian
and Arabic words, that a common clod from the country understands but
little of the so-called Osmanli, though its grammar is exactly the same as
the grammar which he uses in his Tataric utterance.

There is, perhaps, no language so full of words evidently derived from the
most distant sources as English. Every country of the globe seems to have
brought some of its verbal manufactures to the intellectual market of
England. Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Celtic, Saxon, Danish, French, Spanish,
Italian, German--nay, even Hindustani, Malay, and Chinese words, lie mixed
together in the English dictionary. On the evidence of words alone it
would be impossible to classify English with any other of the established
stocks and stems of human speech. Leaving out of consideration the smaller
ingredients, we find, on comparing the Teutonic with the Latin, or
Neo-Latin or Norman elements in English, that the latter have a decided
majority over the home-grown Saxon terms. This may seem incredible; and if
we simply took a page of any English book, and counted therein the words
of purely Saxon and Latin origin, the majority would be no doubt on the
Saxon side. The articles, pronouns, prepositions, and auxiliary verbs, all
of which are of Saxon growth, occur over and over