T SANSKRIT, PRAKRIT, AND APABHRANCA 1. The Origin of Sanskrit OMETIME in the course of the second millennium B.C. Indo-European tribes occupied, in varying degrees of com- pleteness, vast areas in Iran, Asia Minor, and north-west India.! The problems of their movements and affiliations are still far from solution, but on linguistic grounds we postulate a group conveniently styled Aryan, whose speech can be regarded as the ancestor of the speeches of India and Iran. Of these Indian speeches* our oldest evidence is the Rgveda, and the language of this great collection of hymns is obviously a hieratic and conventional one. It testifies to the cultivation of sacred poetry by rival families of priests among many distinct tribes during a considerable period of time, and in various localities. Some of the hymns were doubtless composed in the Punjab, others in the region which in the Brahmanas is recognized as the home of the Kurus and Paficalas, tribes representing the con- solidation of units familiar to us in the Rgveda. It is even claimed that Book vi is the poetry of the period before the tribes entered India proper, though the contention is still implausible. That, under these circumstances, the speech of the Rgveda should show dialectic mixture is only to be expected, and, despite the great difficulties involving the attempt to discriminate, some progress is possible towards determining the characteristics of the dialect which lies at the basis of the Rgveda. It was marked by the open pronunciation of intervocalic dh, bh, d, and dh as h, 4, and /4; by the change of Z into r; and by the intrusion of the pronominal instrumental plural termination ebAis into the 1 Cf. Keith, Religion and Philosophy of the Veda, Chap. I. 2 Cf, Wackernagel, Altind. Gramm., i, pp. ix f.; H. Reichelt, Festschrift Streit- berg (1924), pp. 238ff.; Macdonell, Vedic Grammar (1yto); Meillet, IF. xxxi. 120ff.; JA. 1910, i, 184 ff; Mélanges Lévi, p. 20; Grammont, MSL. xix. 254 ff. 5 Bloch, Formation de la langue marathe (1920); S. K, Chatterji, Bengali (1926). Ba4 SANSKRIT, PRAKRIT, AND APABHRANCA nominal declension. Borrowings from other dialects can here and there be confidently asserted ; in some cases the forms thus found may be regarded as of equal age with those of the Rgveda, as in the case of words in / and jajyhati, with 77h in lieu of ks for Aryan gzh, but in other instances we find forms! which are phonetically more advanced than those normal in the Rgveda, and attest loans either from tribes whose speech had undergone more rapid change, perhaps as the result of greater admixture with non-Aryan elements, or from lower classes of the population. Thus we have irregular cerebrals as in kata beside kyta, hata be- side karta; ch for ps in krchra; jy for dy in jyotis; i for r in githira;; busa for brga, and many other anomalous forms. To localize these dialects is in the main impossible ; the rhotacism of the Rgveda accords with its western origin, for the same phenomenon is Iranian. The use of / is later a sign of eastern connexion, and in one stereotyped phrase, sive duhité, we per- haps find ¢ for az, as in the eastern Prakrit. From the language of the Rgveda we can trace a steady development to Classical Sanskrit, through the later Sarhhitas and the Brahmanas. The development, however, is of a special kind; it is not the spontaneous growth of a popular speech un- hampered by tradition and unregulated by grammatical studies. The language of the tribes whose priests cherished the hymns of the Rgveda 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, Munda or Dravidian tribes, fell under their control.? 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 ¢o stereotype. In India 1 In some cases, no doubt, forms have been altered in transmission. 2 Cf. W. Petersen, JAOS. xxxii. 414-28 ; Michelson, JAOS. xxiii. 145-9 ; Keith, Camb, Hist, India, i. 109 ff, Common sense renders Dravidian and Munda influences inevitable, though proof may be difficult ; Przyluski, MSL. xxii, 205 ff.; BSL, xxiv. 120, 255 ff., xxv. 66. ; Bloch, xxv. 1; Lévi, JA.cciii. 1-56. Prayluski endeavours to prove Austroasiatic influence on culture; JA. ccv. 101 ff.; ceviii. r ff.; BSL. xvi. 9ST. Cf. Poussin, /ndo-errroptens, pp. 198 fi.; Chatterji, i. 170ff., 199.THE ORIGIN OF SANSKRIT 5 the process was accentuated by the remarkable achievements of her early grammarians whose analytical skill far surpassed any- thing 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 con- jugation 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 Ramayana 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 Sarasvati, which was destined to expiate errors of speech during the sacrifice, and in the Mahabhasya of Pataiijali (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 va was tar va nah for yad va nas tad va nak, but who, while sacrificing, were scrupulously exact. The influence of the grammarians, whose results were summed up in Panini’s As/adhydyi, probably in the fourth century B.C., is seen in the rigid scheme of euphonic combination of the words within the sentence or line of verse. This is clearly artificial, converting a natural speech tendency into something impossibly rigid, and, as applied to the text of the Rgveda, often ruining the metrical effect. Similar rigidity is seen in the process which sub- stitutes in many cases y and v for the #y and uv of the earlier speech. Dialectic influence may be traced in the recognition of Zin many words in lieu of y, and a certain distinction between the dialect which underlies the Rgveda and that of Panini is revealed by the absolute ignoring by the latter of the substitution of / and h for d and dk! Otherwise the chief mark of progress is the growth of the tendency to cerebralization, possibly under Dravidian influence. In morphology there was elimination of double forms; @ as a variant for eva in the instrumental singular of a stems disappeared, 3 Ch Laders, Festschrift Wackernagel, pp. 294 ff.