De Sacy has discovered a more ambitious attempt, in the language called “Balaïbalan.” This curious idiom was invented by the Sufis, to be used in their mystical books, with the object of wrapping the speculations of their theologians in still greater mystery. They made up, on no special plan, the words that seemed to them to sound most strangely to their ears. If however this so-called language did not belong to any family and if the meaning given to its sounds was entirely arbitrary, yet the principles of euphony, the grammar and the syntax, everything in fact which gives a language its special character, bore the unmistakable stamp of Arabic and Persian. The Sufis produced a jargon at once Aryan and Semitic, and of no importance whatever. The pious colleagues of Djelat-Eddin-Rumi were not able to invent a language; and clearly this power has not been given to any single man.[118] Hence the language of a race is closely bound up with its intelligence, and has the power of reflecting its various mental stages, as they are reached. This power may be at first only implicit.[119] Where the mental development of a race is faulty or imperfect, the language suffers to the same extent. This is shown by Sanscrit, Greek, and the Semitic group, as well as by Chinese, in which I have already pointed out a utilitarian tendency corresponding to the intellectual bent of the people. The superabundance of philosophical and ethnological terms in Sanscrit corresponds to the genius of those who spoke it, as well as its richness and rhythmic beauty. The same is the case with Greek; while the lack of precision in the Semitic tongues is exactly paralleled by the character of the Semitic peoples. If we leave the cloudy heights of the remoter ages, and come down to the more familiar regions of modern history, we shall be, as it were, presiding at the birth of many new tongues; and this will make us see with even greater clearness how faithfully language mirrors the genius of a race.