Tribes in Ancient India c5.38

c5.38

The next important mention of the Kāmbojas is in a passage of Yāska’s *Nirukta* (II, 8), which shows that they spoke a dialect of the Vedic tongue differing in some respects from the standard language, which in Yāska’s time was apparently in language of the Madhyadeśa, the region around the Ganges-Jumna Doab. The Kāmbojas appear from Yāska’s remarks to have been a Vedic people who had retained the original sense of an ancient verb (*śavati*) while it was lost among other sections of the same people, who were separated from them by geographical barriers. Sir George Grierson, however, deduces from Yāska's remarks that, as *śavati* is an Iranian, not a Sanskrit, word, the Kāmbojas cannot have been Indo-Aryans. He holds that they either spoke Sanskrit with an infusion of Iranian words to which they gave Indian inflexions, or else spoke a language partly Indo-Aryan and partly Iranian.¹