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362 had despised them. This was a mere repetition of history. Sanskrit became fixed, and in time ceased to be generally intelligible. Then the vernacular Pāli was used for popular literature. When literary Pāli became generally unintelligible, the vernacular Prākrit was employed for the same purpose. Prākrit itself became crystallized, and in the course of generations had to yield to Apabhraṁśa. While the earlier Prākrits had been manipulated for literary purposes by the omission of what was considered vulgar and by the reduction of wild luxuriance to classical uniformity, so that the result was more or less artificial, the Apabhraṁśas were not nearly so severely edited, and the sparse literature which has survived affords valuable evidence as to the actual spoken language at the time of its committal to writing. The modern vernaculars are the direct children of these Apabhraṁśas. The Śaurasena Apabhraṁśa was the parent of Western Hindī and Panjābī. Closely connected with it were Āvantī, whose head quarters were round what is now Ujjain, the parent of Rājasthānī; and Gaurjarī, the parent of Gujarātī. The remaining intermediate language, Eastern Hindī, is sprung from Ardhamāgadha Apabhraṁśa.

Turning to the Outer Band, an unnamed Apabhraṁśa was the parent of Lahndā and Kāshmīrī, the latter, as has been said, having as its base some Piśācha language akin to Shmā, over which the modern language lies as a second layer. Sindhī is derived from a Vrāchaḍa Apabhraṁśa spoken in the country of the lower Indus, and Marāṭhī is the child of the Apabhraṁśa of Mahārāshṭra. In the east, the great Māgadha Apabhraṁśa is not only the parent of Bihārī in its proper home, but has also branched out in three directions. To the south it became Oṛiyā; to the south-east it developed into the Bengali of Central Bengal ; while to the east, keeping north of the Ganges, its children are Northern Bengali, and, farther on, Assamese. These three branches can be distinctly traced. In some respects Oṛiyā and Northern Bengali preserve common features which have disappeared in Central Bengal. Concurrently with the development of the Indo-Aryan we have Sanskrit, the literary language of the Brāhmanical schools, endowed with all the prestige which religion and learning could give it. In earlier times its influence was strongest in the proper home, the Midland. Allowing for phonetic corruption, the vocabulary of Śaurasenī Prākrit is practically the same as that of Sanskrit. The farther we go from the Midland the more strange words we meet, words which are technically known as deśya or