A History of Sanskrit Literature c7.s2.9

c7.s2.9

These facts are not in dispute, and the predominance of Sanskrit in the sphere in question remained unchallenged until the Mahomedan invasions brought a new literary language into prominence. The evidence indicates clearly that Sanskrit must have been in constant use as a means of teaching and performing religious duties among the Brahmins at least. It has been denied that it was really even their vernacular in the time of Pāṇini, and *a fortiori* later, but the evidence for this view is unsatisfactory. Pāṇini has rules⁴ which are meaningless for anything but a vernacular, apart from the fact that the term Bhāṣā which he applies to the speech he teaches has the natural sense of a spoken language. Thus the doubling of consonants is expressly forbidden in passionate speech, as in the term of abuse *putrādini* applied to a cruel mother; he prescribes the use of prolongation in the case of calling from a distance, in greeting, question, and reply; he gives information on the terminology of dicing and the speech of herdsmen; he cites expressions redolent of real daily life. Indeed, it is the grammarians alone who preserve for us such usages as the repetition of the second person imperative followed by the present indicative to express intense action: *khāda khādeti khādati*, ‘eagerly he eats’, whence we have in colloquial Marāṭhī *khā khā khāto*; other popular uses are *udarapūram bhuṅkte*, ‘he eats filling his belly’; *daṇḍādaṇḍi keçākeçi*, ‘a struggle in which sticks are brandished and hair is pulled’; *atra khādatamodatā vartate*, ‘eat and enjoy’ is the rule here; *jahistambo ’yam*, ‘he is one who says “strike the sheaves of corn”’. They record also the parenthetical use¹ of *manye*, ‘I think’; the humorous *apacasi*, ‘you’re no cook’; and authorize such quaint forms² as *yāmaki*, ‘I go’. The elaborate rules regarding the accent reflect also actual speech.