Wilson Philological Lectures on Sanskrit and the Derived Languages c12.2

c12.2

Thus, gentlemen, have we surveyed the whole field of Indian Aryan speech from the Vedic times to our own, and what is it we have found? The Vedic dialect lost a great many of its words and some grammatical forms, its nouns and roots arranged themselves under definite declensions and conjugations, and thus became what I have called Middle Sanskrit. Till then there was no phonetic corruption except in isolated instances. But after that time the process went on rapidly, and words were altered in form principally by the law of the assimilation of conjunct consonants and a few vowel changes. By the law of generalization or false analogy the declensions and conjugations were reduced to the prevailing types; some new words came into use and a few old ones became obsolete, and thus the language arrived at a stage of which the Pâli, the sacred language of the Southern Buddhists, and the inscriptions of As'oka afford us specimens. Then began a general use of attributive expressions for verbal forms, which had its effect on the vernacular or derived languages also, and thus while a good many of these forms went out of use in Sanskrit, the number of tenses and moods in the derived languages was reduced to three. In the meanwhile the processes which formed the Pâli went on, other laws of phonetic change, and principally that of the elision of uninitial consonants and the reduction of aspirated ones to ह, came into operation. The use of analogy in the simplification of grammar proceeded further, a few words of a non-Sanskrit origin were adopted, and thus arose the Prâkṛits. There were several dialects of this class, but the distinction between them was not great. After a while in the Prâkṛits themselves new phonetic processes began, the chief of which were the dropping of one of the assimilated consonants and in most cases lengthening the preceding vowel, and the obviating of the hiatus caused by the vowels brought together by consonantal elision by combining them or inserting light semi-vowels between them. These were carried on further, the declensional and conjugational terminations were corrupted and mutilated, and the forms began to get confused; case relations came to be expressed by connecting independent words or pronominal forms with the genitive of the noun; and new verbal forms were constructed from the participles by appending the personal terminations on the analogy of the existing tenses, or by using the roots indicative of existence as auxiliaries. About this time the Prâkṛit speaking people came to be divided into independent communities, separated from each other by hills and rivers, or communication between them decreased; and therefore these several processes of destruction and construction were carried on at a varying rate and with a difference of detail in each; and thus grew up the modern Hindî, Mârâṭhî, Gujarâtî, Sindhî, &c. This is the whole history. The vernaculars have descended from the Prâkṛits, and the Prâkṛits from Sanskrit; and since a language is transmitted from generation to generation orally, if the modern dialects are spoken languages the Prâkṛits must have been so, and if the Prâkṛits were spoken dialects the Sanskrit must have been so.