Wilson Philological Lectures on Sanskrit and the Derived Languages c8.52

c8.52

But what could be the historical events which led to the wholesale assimilation of consonants in the first place and to the similar elision of uninitial consonants in addition to the assimilation, in the next? I would put forward the following hypothesis. It would appear that when the Aryas moved from the land of the five rivers and settled in the country known afterwards as Brahmâvarta and Kurukshetra that is the country about Thânes'var, they formed a consolidated community in which an aboriginal or alien race was incorporated and the language represented by the Pâli was the language of this race. When, however, the consolidated community spread eastwards and southwards, they met other alien races and the dialect spoken by the lowest class of the consolidated community was learnt by these new alien races and the words which were in the Pâli stage were further corrupted into the forms which we find in the Prâkrits. The dialects of the As'oka edicts do not show instances of the Prâkrit rule of elision, though some peculiarities of one or two later dialects are discernable in them. Does this necessarily show that the Prâkrits had not developed in the time of As'oka? I think not. The dialects of the edicts represent the spoken language of the more cultured portion of the consolidated community and not that used by the races which were newly incorporated with the community and formed a class lower in the scale, though the Prâkrits must have begun to be developed about the time of As'oka. In the Nâsik cave inscriptions of about the second century of the Christian era we observe some instances of the Prâkrit peculiarity of elision, whence it would appear that the Prâkrits had then come into existence though they were still regarded as vulgar and were neglected, the principal inscriptions being in the Pâli which had then become a learned language. The conclusion we came to in the last lecture, that the Pâli represents middle Sanskrit in a vernacular form while the Prâkrits correspond to the last or classical stage, is in harmony with this view.