Page:Growth of Asamiya Language.pdf/40

 30 THE ORIGIN AND GROWTH OF THE ASAMIYA LANGUAGE X, 114, 3); it means locks of hair worn by Asamiya Aryans, men and women, though men now generally wear their hair short. (A.V.B.). It is of course not quite safe to suppose that all the Asamiya words having any similarity with Vedie or Sanskrit words were derived from the latter, and that the opposite process could not be possible. A. B. Keith in his History of Sanskrit Literature describes "Sanskrit as a ver- naculas" in his preface and notes: "On the question of the origin of Sanskrit no conclusive evidence has been recently adduced.... It is clear that the Aryan Invaders succeeded in Imposing their speech on many of the earlier inhaloitants of the country, and there is no cogent argument to refute the natural belief that strange Prakritic forms, such as we find sporadically even in the Rgveda, when not mere later corrup- tions, are often loan-words from class dialects with which the speakers of the anore conservative form of speech were in contact. The influence of lower speech-forms was doubtless of increasing importance, since it evoked the elaborate grammatical studies ammed up in the Awadh- sãyi testifying to the anxiety of the priests to preserve the Bhagl from corruption, and Patanjall's insistence on the evils of barbarisms doubt- less proves their occurrence. But there seems no ground for conceiving of the position as one in which the priests used a formal language only in their business, and discarded It for a true vernacular in daily life.... The presence of many Sanskritized versions of Prikrit terms to which Zachariae has suggested an interesting addition in the term prothe, is a perfectly natural phenomenon where higher and lower speeches exist contemporaneously in the same community, apart altogether from the further possibilitis of speech mixture due to the development of local as well as class dialects. At any rate, arguments used to deny vernacu. lar character to Sanskrit are quite adequate to prove the same hypothesis of standard English, which unquestionably is a true vernacular. "Moreover, the fact that Sanskrit was thus regularly used in cont versation by the upper classes, court circles, eventually following the examples of the Brahmans in this regard, helps to explain the constant influence exercised by the higher form of speech on the vernaculars which reveals itself inter alia in the constant Influx of Tate, words whose phonetic state runs counter to the tendencies of the vernacular. rowing from literature only those who adopted the vernaculars for the purpose of writing in any form or literary composition were doubtless in constant touch with circles in which Sanskrit was actually in living use...... for the period from A.D. 300 up to 1200....there is little evidence of any fundamental change in the extent or character of the use of Sanskrit: the same impression is given by Katra, perhaps c. 400, the Kiyamimamid of Rajasekhara (c. 900), and Balhana (c. 11.00). (pp. XXIV, XXVII).