Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/247

VI.] and is the lingua franca, the official language and means of general intercourse, throughout nearly the whole peninsula. The tongue of the roving Gypsies all over Europe, though everywhere strongly tinged with the local idiom of the region of their wanderings, is in its main structure and material a modern Hindu patois: the Gypsies are exiles from India.

Next older than the languages we have mentioned are the Prakrit and the Pali, represented by a literature and inscriptions which come to us in part from before the Christian era. The Pali is the sacred language of the Buddhist religion in the countries lying eastward and south-eastward from India. The Prakrit dialects are chiefly preserved in the Sanskrit dramas, where the unlearned characters, the women, servants, and the like, talk Prakrit—just as, in a modern German theatre, one may hear the lower personages talk the dialects of their own districts, while the higher employ the literary German, the common speech of the educated throughout the country.

The virtual mother of all these dialects is the Sanskrit. For the last twenty-five centuries, at least, the Sanskrit has been no longer a proper vernacular language, but kept artificially in life, as the sacred dialect of Brahmanism and the cultivated tongue of literature and learning; thus occupying a position closely analogous with that held by the Latin since the decline of the western empire, as the language of Roman Catholicism, and the means of communication among the learned of all Europe. It is still taught in the schools of the Brahmanic priesthood, used in the ceremonies of their religion, and spoken and written by their foremost scholars—although, like the Latin in more recent times, much shaken in its sway by the uprise of the modern cultivated dialects, and the decadence of the religion with whose uses it is identified. We possess it in two somewhat varying forms, the classical Sanskrit, and the older idiom of the so-called Vedas, the Bible of the Hindu faith. The former is more altered, by elaborate and long-continued literary and grammatical training, from the condition of a true vernacular, than is almost any other known literary language. Partly for this reason, and partly because, at the time of its