Page:A Comparative Grammar of the Modern Aryan Languages of India Vol 1.djvu/38

16 Saiva form of Hinduism was being singularly mixed up with the newer and more attractive Vaishnava creed, and the Brahmans were rapidly resuming their long-lost sway over the popular mind. Now Buddhism had specially selected the vernaculars of the day as the vehicle for its teaching, and the Brahmans, in resuscitating their religion, naturally brought back the sacred Sanskrit. In the passage above cited Bisal Dev exhorts his son to have the Ramayan, Mahabharat, and Purans read to him, and in the same poem the bard recites the names and number of verses of the eighteen Purans as a means of purifying the souls of his listeners. The public readings and recitations of Sanskrit works must have familiarized the minds of the masses with the ancient forms of words, and no doubt the Brahmans did their best to foster the use of these ancient forms, as they do at the present day, so that gradually a large class of words in their pure Sanskrit shape got into circulation. These words, when once more current, naturally began to undergo the influences which are always at work upon human speech, and developed by degrees into the forms in which we now have them. This process, once begun, has continued to the present day.

The words resuscitated from Sanskrit in the post-Buddhistic period do not appear to have been changed according to the same general rules as those which prevailed in times when the Prakrits were spoken. In those earlier times the elision of single consonants in the middle of a word seems to have been almost universal, and even initial letters are sometimes rejected. But in the modern words a more manly and vigorous