Wilson Philological Lectures on Sanskrit and the Derived Languages c12.4

c12.4

Mr. Beames at one time expressed himself decidedly on this point: "The Prâkṛit of the poets is clearly not a dialect that ever was spoken." So Dr. Pischel, a German scholar: "I agree with Mr. Beames, that none of the Prâkṛits was ever a spoken language, and that in order to learn what was the spoken language of the Aryans we must turn principally to the modern vernaculars." This, gentlemen, we have done; we have examined the vernaculars and found that there is not a rule about the changes of letters in passing from Sanskrit into the Prâkṛit given by Vararuchi or Hemachandra, of which instances are not found in the vernaculars. Of such as are general the examples are abundant; and in a great many cases even the words in which the change is of a special kind are preserved in the vernaculars in their Prâkṛit form, slightly altered according to the processes that afterwards came into operation. A good many of the vocal peculiarities of the Pâli and Prâkṛit speakers are preserved by the speakers of the Gujarâtî, Marâṭhî, Hindî, Sindhî, and Bangâlî. I have already drawn your attention to the fact that the ordinary Gujarâtî cannot pronounce ए or औ but makes ए or ओ of it, the Marâṭhî De'sastha ण of न, and the Sindhî and the Bangâlî ख्व of क्ष, and the Hindî ख्व or ख of it and स of the sibilant. The Bangâlî pronounces a conjunct ending in य as a double consonant and preserves the old Mâgadhî peculiarity of reducing all the sibilants to श, while the Hindî still manifests the Pais'âchî peculiarity of making न of ण. The case terminations in the forms they assumed in the Apabhramṣ'a have been perserved, some in this dialect, some in that. All the three Prâkṛit tenses do exist and none other; past time is expressed in just the same way as in the Prâkṛits; the participles, the causals, the passives, the denominatives, the nominal and verbal bases, and the remnants of the Sanskrit conjugations are just as they were in the Prâkṛits; and the new verbs and cases are formed out of Prâkṛit materials only. Then again a good many of the Des'ya or non-Sanskrit words that existed in the Prâkṛits are found in the vernaculars.