Wilson Philological Lectures on Sanskrit and the Derived Languages c8.2

c8.2

On the last occasion we examined the language of the sacred books of the Southern Buddhists, and found that a large portion of the words it contains are pure Sanskrit and the rest are Sanskrit words corrupted or transformed according to certain laws of phonetic decay. Then by the law of false analogy the less used and less known declensional and conjugational forms have been in many cases brought over to the type of those more used in Sanskrit and consequently better known. So that in the vocabulary and the grammar the laws of growth I traced in the opening lecture are in operation, but their range is limited, and the dialect is in what may be called the first stage of departure from Sanskrit. We then examined the language of the Inscriptions of As'oka and found that it is either the same as Pâli or in the same stage of development, and that there existed in those times two or three varieties of speech slightly differing from each other. Today I propose to examine certain other dialects which exhibit a much greater departure from the parent tongue. These are the so-called Prâkrits. For a knowledge of these languages we have not to go beyond India, as in the case of the one we have examined. Prâkrit dialects possessed a literature and a portion of it has come down to us.