Page:A history of Sanskrit literature (1900), Macdonell, Arthur Anthony.djvu/34

. Thus we find that the vocabulary has been greatly extended by derivation and composition according to recognised types. At the same time there are numerous words which, though old, seem to be new only because they happen by accident not to occur in the Vedic literature. Many really new words have, however, come in through continual borrowings from a lower stratum of language, while already existing words have undergone great changes of meaning.

This later phase of the ancient language of India was stereotyped by the great grammarian Pāṇini towards the end of the fourth century B.C. It came to be called Sanskrit, the "refined" or "elaborate" (saṃ-skṛi-ta, literally "put together"), a term not found in the older grammarians, but occurring in the earliest epic, the Rāmāyaṇa. The name is meant to be opposed to that of the popular dialects called Prākṛita, and is so opposed, for instance, in the Kāvyādarça, or Mirror of Poetry, a work of the sixth century A.D. The older grammarians themselves, from Yāska (fifth century B.C.) onwards, speak of this classical dialect as Bhāshā, "the speech," in distinction from Vedic. The remarks they make about it point to a spoken language. Thus one of them, Patañjali, refers to it as used "in the world," and designates the words of his Sanskrit as "current in the world." Pāṇini himself gives many rules which have no significance except in connection with living speech; as when he describes the accent or the lengthening of vowels in calling from a distance, in salutation, or in question and answer. Again, Sanskrit cannot have been a mere literary and school language, because there are early traces of its having had dialectic variations. Thus Yāska and Pāṇini mention the peculiarities