A History of Sanskrit Literature c3.107

c3.107

In an exhaustive analysis of Yāska's etymologies³ Dr. Hannes Sköld has suggested that certain of the suggested derivations are only explicable on the ground that Yāska was familiar with and used a Middle Indian (Prākrit) speech. Beside this suggestion may be placed the opinion recently expressed by Professor H. Lüders,⁴ that the language of Açoka's Chancery was 'eine Art Hochsprache', while the actually spoken speech was much further advanced and probably had reached the stage represented in the literary Prākrits, though it is candidly admitted that the latter point cannot be said yet to have been established. Nor, it may be added, are Sköld's proofs regarding Yāska free from much doubt. But the more important issue is whether the matter is really to be viewed in the light suggested, of a contrast between actually spoken language and a Hochsprache. It is rather, it appears to me, a matter of class speeches; Yāska spoke Sanskrit much as he wrote it, and the officials of Açoka equally conversed in a speech essentially similar to that in which they wrote, while contemporaneously lower classes of the population spoke in dialects which were far further advanced in phonetic change. It is clear that the Aryan invaders succeeded in imposing their speech on many of the earlier inhabitants of the country, and there is no cogent argument to refute the natural belief that strange Prācritic forms, such as we find sporadically even in the *Ṛgveda*, when not mere later corruptions are often loan-words from class dialects with which the speakers of the more conservative form of speech were in contact. The influence of lower speech-forms was doubtless of increasing importance, since it evoked the elaborate grammatical studies summed up in the *Aṣṭādhyāyī*, testifying to the anxiety of the priests to preserve the Bhāṣā from corruption, and Patañjali's insistence¹ on the evils of barbarisms doubtless proves their occurrence. But there seems no ground for conceiving of the position as one in which the priests used a formal language only in their business, and discarded it for a true vernacular in daily life. There seems a very fair analogy with the standard English of the higher classes of society in this country; the East-end curate's true vernacular is standard English, though he ought to be able to adapt his speech to the comprehension of the dockers if he works at a mission, and a landowner's true vernacular is that which he habitually uses in his own circle, not that in which he talks familiarly to his farm workers or villagers of the old type, whose dialect often is as different from standard English as an old Prākrit from Sanskrit. The presence of many Sanskritized versions of Prākrit terms, to which Zachariae² has suggested an interesting addition in the term *protha*,³ is a perfectly natural phenomenon where higher and lower speeches exist contemporaneously in the same community, apart altogether from the further possibilities of speech mixture due to the development of local as well as class dialects. At any rate arguments used to deny vernacular character to Sanskrit are quite adequate to prove the same hypothesis of standard English, which unquestionably is a true vernacular.¹