Page:Sanskrit Grammar by Whitney p1.djvu/16

 The attention of special students of the Hindu grammar (and the subject is so intricate and difficult that the number is exceedingly small of those who have mastered it sufficiently to have a competent opinion on such general matters) has been hitherto mainly directed toward determining what the Sanskrit according to Pāṇini really is, toward explaining the language from the grammar. And, naturally enough, in India, or wherever else the leading object is to learn to speak and write the language correctly — that is, as authorized by the grammarians — that is the proper course to pursue. This, however, is not the way really to understand the language. The time must soon come, or it has come already, when the endeavor shall be instead to explain the grammar from the language: to test in all details, so far as shall be found possible, the reason of Pāṇini’s rules (which contain not a little that seems problematical, or even sometimes perverse); to determine what and how much genuine usage he had everywhere as foundation, and what traces may be left in the literature of usages possessing an inherently authorized character, though unratified by him.

By the term “classical” or “later” language, then, as constantly used below in the grammar, is meant the language of those literary monuments which are written in conformity with the rules of the native grammar: virtually, the whole proper Sanskrit literature. For although parts of this are doubtless earlier than Pāṇini, it is impossible to tell just what parts, or how far they have escaped in their style the leveling influence of the grammar. The whole, too, may be called so far an artificial literature as it is written in a phonetic form (see grammar, 101 a) which never can have been a truly vernacular and living one. Nearly all of it is metrical: not poetic works only, but narratives, histories (so far as anything deserving that name can be said to exist), and scientific treatises of every variety, are done into verse; a prose and a prose literature hardly has an existence (the principal exceptions, aside from the voluminous commentaries, are a few stories, as the and the ). Of linguistic history there is next to nothing