He further suggests that this question is also relevant to discussions of dialectology and linguistic purism, among other areas of linguistics.
The structure of New Persian has hardly altered at all since the Shahuama; but the original purism of Firdousi, who made every effort to keep the language Iree from Semitic admixture, could not long be maintained.
The Babylonian syllabary which thus arose, and which, as the culture passed on to the north - known as Assyria - became the Babylonian Assyrian syllabary, 3 was enlarged and modified in the course of time, the Semitic equivalents for many of the signs being distorted or abbreviated to form the basis of new "phonetic" values that were thus of " Semitic " origin; but, on the whole, the " non-Semitic " character of the signs used as syllables in the phonetic method of writing Semitic words was preserved; and, furthermore, down to the latest days of the Babylonian and Assyrian empires the mixed method of writing continued, though there were periods when " purism " was the fashion, and there was a more marked tendency to spell out the words laboriously in preference to using signs with a phonetic complement as an aid in suggesting the reading desired in any given instance.