Page:A Comparative Grammar of the Modern Aryan Languages of India Vol 1.djvu/48

26 punkah, jungle, and the like, from our great dependency of India, so the Roman picked up words from Asia, Egypt, Northern Europe, and far-distant Britain. The language thus composed was undoubtedly, when tested by the standard of classical Latin, very uncouth and barbarous, and was in consequence for many centuries despised by learned men, who continued to write, and even to speak, Latin. It was not till the thirteenth century that some great minds broke through the prejudices of their age, and, influenced by a strong desire of being intelligible to the mass of their countrymen, commenced timidly and half apologetically to write in the vulgar tongue. If then this was the case in Southern Europe, we are justified, by the known analogy between the Romance processes of development and those of the modern Aryans, in believing that the same thing took place in India. The assumption is so much the more reasonable in the latter class of languages, because the Brahmans were animated by an openly avowed and steadily pursued design of keeping their writings sacred from the intrusion of the people, and, believing or professing to believe their language to be of divine origin, were more earnest and careful in preserving it from being polluted by the introduction of "low-caste" words, than the Roman poets and historians, who had no higher motives than a search after grace and euphony. Moreover, works continued to be composed in Sanskrit long after the rise of the modern vernaculars, and it is a singular coincidence in point of time, that Chand, the earliest writer in any modern Indian language, is very nearly contemporaneous with the predecessors of Dante; so that the human mind in India broke itself free from the shackles of a dead language very much about the same time as in Europe. The parallel of course does not hold good as regards the invasion of foreign races, because the Greeks, the only early invaders of India whom we know of, appear to have left little or no traces behind them in respect of language. The astrological