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 99. Telugu poetry appealed to a narrow cult. Scholars wrote for scholars, and as time went on, unintelligibility was felt to be high literary merit. The Kavya dialect abounded in learned Sanskrit and in archaisms.

VOCABULARY

100. Perhaps, no language of the world has a more copious stock of synonyms than the Telugu poetic dialect; for, here, we have the singular phenomenon of an almost wholesale annexation of a great dead language, Sanskrit, and unrestricted borrowing from the literary Prakrits.

101. In the native element there is a wealth of variants of words and of grammatical forms belonging to different ages and different dialects and there are coinages of the poets too.

102. The retention in hand of this cumbrous vocabulary was necessitated mainly by metrical exigencies. Indigenous Telugu poetry was alliterative and the pandit imposed upon it the quantitative restrictions of Sanskrit regular metres. Telugu metres modelled on Sanskrit regular metres, had eight alliterative points and the first two letters of a verse determined the shape and position of seven words in a quatrain!

103. In indigenous metres, the alliterative points were fewer. Sometimes whole poems were written in one of these metres, namely, dwipada. But this metre was not popular with the poets who preferred the varying rhythm and the majestic sweep of Sanskritic metres to the dull monotone of the dwipada. In the former, lines ended in longs; but words with final shorts preponderated in the poetic dialect; and poets were reduced to all kinds of shifts to close verse lines with longs. The Canarese poets from whom Telugu probably borrowed some popular Sanskritic metres, were wiser and discarded what is called the pause 1311 Minute of Dissent