Age of the Nandas and Mauryas c12.s12.24

c12.s12.24

The rapprochement between the Indo-Aryan and the Dravidian and Austric speeches was going on intensely during this period when the fusion of the diverse elements of the population into a common Hindu people under the intellectual domination of the Brahmans was in full swing. The Aryan language was being transformed from its purer Indo-European character into something different under the impact on Non-Aryan, through a larger and larger number of non-Aryan speakers turning into speakers of Indo-Aryan. In Middle Indo-Aryan, the Old Indo-Aryan accent had changed from a free pitch to a fixed stress. Vowel length became dependent more on speech rhythm than on etymology, a tendency towards an open rather than closed pronunciation of syllables became established (this led to widespread assimilation of conjunct consonants 'ushering in the Middle Indo-Aryan stage e.g. dhar-ma, sah-ya, bhak-ta, of earlier Old Indo-Aryan became dha-rma, sa-hya, bha-kta, etc. which were soon assimilated to dhamma, sajjha, bhatta), and there was an increase in the cerebralisation of t, th, d, dh, n, to ṭ, ṭh, ḍ, ḍh, ṇ and of l to ḷ; also the voicing of the intervocal unvoiced stops and aspirates started by which loka became loga, aṭavī became aḍavi and aḷavī etc., and in morphology we note a tendency towards reducing all declensions and conjugations of Old Indo-Aryan to a single type, and the commencement of the use of post-positional help words after case inflexions of the noun; besides, the inflected tenses and moods of the verb were reduced, and there was a larger use of participial adjectives, present, past and future, to express the time idea of the finite verb; further, the conjunctive participle or gerund in the -tvā (-tvī) and -ya became an exceedingly popular form. The vocabulary changed its character : a great many Old Aryans words were dropped, and their places were taken either by new Indo-Aryan formations, or by borrowings from the non-Aryan languages which entered the Aryan language through the back-door (i.e. without scholars admitting that they were non-Aryan words) and by the score. The entire spirit of Indo-Aryan was during the second half of the first millennium B. C. being changed fundamentally, and Aryan was more and more approximating the spirit of Dravidian and Kol (Austric).