Page:A Comparative Grammar of the Modern Aryan Languages of India Vol 1.djvu/39

Rh pronunciation obtained, and these elisions are not so frequent. It is unadvisable here to anticipate remarks more properly belonging to Chapter III., and I content myself therefore with noting the fact.

We have, then, a continuous succession of layers or strata of words, from those which have come down through the Prakrits, and which I call, for the sake of distinction, early Tadbhavas, to those which were revived from Sanskrit at the time of the reaction against Buddhism; and after these a constant series of words, to be called modern or late Tadbhavas, less and less removed from the pure Sanskrit form in proportion as the date of their revival is more and more recent; till at last we reach words which have only been dug up by Pandits in the present century, and have not yet had time to become changed in any way. Some of the early Tadbhavas have been exceedingly altered, so much so that all resemblance to Sanskrit has been lost, and the Pandits have therefore classed them together with non-Aryan words as Desaja.

§ 6. It may now be asked, how do we distinguish between early and late Tadbhavas in cases where the word is not found in any Prakrit writer? To answer this, an analogy must be drawn from the Romance languages of Europe, whose relation to the Latin is so strikingly parallel to that which our seven languages bear to Sanskrit. It is not intended here to carry out the comparison to its fullest extent. Deeply interesting and fascinating as the task would be, this is not the place for it, nor are sufficient materials available. But it may be stated as a general proposition, that in the whole realm of linguistic science there exists no more remarkable similarity than that between the history of the development down to its minutest particulars of the VOL. I.