Wilson Philological Lectures on Sanskrit and the Derived Languages c8.81.4

c8.81.4

and we find that the Prâkrits have mostly lost all the Sanskrit tenses and moods except three, and past time is generally expressed by the past participle and contingency by the present; while the Pâli has, as we have seen, preserved eight, including all the past tenses and the conditional. Middle Sanskrit bears to later or classical Sanskrit the same relation, in this respect, that the Pâli bears to the Prâkrits. The change that came over Sanskrit between the two periods left its impress on what may be called the Vernacular speech. This could not have been the case unless Sanskrit had continued to influence that form of speech represented first by the Pâli and afterwards by the Prâkrits. And it was because it continued so to influence it, that the Prâkrits came to have sounds and grammatical forms also derived direct from Sanskrit and not through the Pâli. This leads to the conclusion, which will be developed in detail in the last lecture, that when the Pâli and the Prâkrits came into existence Sanskrit had not been dead but was as much a living language as either of the other two and both were spoken or used for ordinary purposes, one by men of culture and the other by ordinary people.