Life of Ahmad — Page 441
as MOTHER OF ALL LANGUAGES 441 the Phoenicians to the Greeks. The Phoenicians were certainly using it with freedom in the 9th century, B. C. , with so much freedom indeed, that they must have been in possession of it for a considerable time. The alphabets of India all spring from two sources: (a) the Kharoshi and (b) the Brahmi alphabet. Buheer shows in detail that the Kharoshi alphabet is derived from the alphabet of the Arabic which passed into India with the staff of subordinate officials by whom Darius organised his conquests there. The Brahmi alphabet, according to Taylor and Weber, comes from the Sabaens who carried on trade with India as early as 1,000 B. C. Buhler shows that it comes from the North Semitic. Olshausen maintains, in his very valuable Hebrew Grammar (Brunswick, 1861), that Arabic bears the closest resemblance to the primitive Semitic language. The alphabet of the Indo-European languages still retains a striking similarity to the Semitic not only in sound but also in the order of the letters. A. B. C. D. , for instance, is Abjad of the Arabic, Q. R. S. T. is Qarshat ; and K. L. M. N. is Kaliman. In this book Ahmad as discussed three points: (1) There is something in common between all the languages of the world: (2) Arabic is the mother of all. (3) Being a perfect language Arabic is the revealed language. To show that there is something common in all languages a long list of common words was prepared by Maulaw i N u r-ud-D i n ra (2) Maulaw i Abdul Kar i m ra (3) Munsh i Ghulam Q a dir Fas ih ra (4)