The Cambridge History of India, Vol. I: Ancient India v1.c17.87

v1.c17.87

The language is of the highest interest, as it reveals to us an Indo-European speech with a singular clarity of structure and wealth of inflection, even if we admit that the first discoverers of its importance from the point of view of comparative philology exaggerated in some degree these characteristics. Historically it rendered comparative philology the first great impetus, and it must for all time be one of the most important subjects of study. But it is clearly, as preserved in the hymns, a good deal more than a spoken tongue. It is a hieratic language which doubtless diverged considerably in its wealth of variant forms from the speech of the ordinary man of the tribe¹. Moreover it shows clear signs of influence by metrical necessities which induce here and there a disregard of the rules normally strictly observed of concord of noun and attribute. It must be remembered that it was in a peculiar position: in the first place, it was the product of an hereditary priesthood, working on a traditional basis: the very first hymn of the Saṃhitā alludes to the songs of old and new poets: in the second place, the language of all classes was being affected by the influence of contact with the aboriginal tongues. The existence of slaves, male and especially female, must have tended constantly to affect the Āryan speech, and the effect must have been very considerable, if, as seems true, the whole series of lingual letters of the Vedic speech was the result of aboriginal influence. Many of the vast number of words with no known Āryan cognates must be assigned to the same influence. Thus in the period of the Rigveda there was growing up an ever increasing divergence between the speech of the learned and that of the people. As a result the language of literature remains the language of the priesthood and the nobility: it is modified gradually, and finally, at an early date, fixed for good as regards form and construction by the action of the grammarians: on the other hand, the speech of the commoner, in consequence of the constant contact with the aborigines and the growing admixture of blood, develops into Pāli and the Prākrits and finally into the modern vernaculars of India. What we do not know is how far at any given moment in the Vedic period the gulf of separation had extended. Nor do we know whether at this epoch there were distinct dialects of the Vedic speech: efforts to find traces of dialects in the Rigveda have so far ended in no secure result¹.