A History of Sanskrit Literature c7.s1.5

c7.s1.5

From the language of the *Ṛgveda* we can trace a steady development to Classical Sanskrit, through the later Saṁhitās and the Brāhmaṇas. The development, however, is of a special kind; it is not the spontaneous growth of a popular speech unhampered by tradition and unregulated by grammatical studies. The language of the tribes whose priests cherished the hymns of the *Ṛgveda* was subject doubtless to all the normal causes of speech change, accentuated in all likelihood by the gradual addition to the community of non-Aryan elements as the earlier inhabitants of the north, Muṇḍā or Dravidian tribes, fell under their control.² But, at least in the upper classes of the population, alteration was opposed by the constant use of the sacred language and by the study devoted to it. Parallels to such restricted evolution are not hard to find; the history of the Greek Koine, of Latin from its fixation in the first century B.C., and of modern English, attests the power of literature to stereotype. In India the process was accentuated by the remarkable achievements of her early grammarians whose analytical skill far surpassed anything achieved until much later in the western world. In the normal life of language a constant round of destruction and reconstruction takes place; old modes of expression disappear but new are invented; old distinctions of declension and conjugation are wiped out, but new differentiations emerge. In Sanskrit the grammarians accepted and carried even farther than did contemporary vernaculars the process of the removal of irregularities and the disuse of variant forms, but they sanctioned hardly any new formations, producing a form of expression well ordered and purified, worthy of the name Sanskrit which the *Rāmāyaṇa* first accords to it. The importance of the part played by religion in preserving accuracy of speech is shown by the existence of a special form of sacrifice, the Sarasvatī, which was destined to expiate errors of speech during the sacrifice, and in the *Mahābhāṣya* of Patañjali (150 B.C.) it is recorded that there were at one time seers of great knowledge who in their ordinary speech were guilty of using the inaccurate *yar vā ṇas tar vā ṇaḥ* for *yad vā nas tad vā naḥ*, but who, while sacrificing, were scrupulously exact.