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THE INDIAN ANTIQUARY.

[APRIL 5, 1872.

ecclesiastical historians. Take for example the following passage from a chronicle of the tenth century:—“Otto rex veniente Italico regno, tanta pene multitudo gentis in Italia, que sic imple

Prākrit without undergoing a change ; large number of purely Sanskrit words in modern vernacular, and which I imagine non-Aryan school of philologists would

verunt faciem terre, sicut situle. Habebat antem

secum gentes nationes quorum lingue non agnoscebant gentis. Insuper hac habebat gens

signate as tat-sama, never entered into the scholiast's imagination as an element of Prākrit speech, being all of very recent introduction. The

que Guinula vocabantur, sarcinas et carros et

two examples that he gives of tat-sama words

machina portantes.

are such as it would be difficult to connect with

Erat enim aspectus eorum

the the the de

orribilis, et curbis properantes, carpentes iter et

any Sanskrit root.

ad prelium ut ferro stantes.”

To use the very

natural object, the other a colloquial exclamation;

words of the learned editor of the Lalita Vistara,

and both would appear to have been borrowed not from the Sanskrit, but by the Sanskrit from

it professes to be Latin and yet does not conform to its rules: though at the same time the simi larity is sufficient to render the meaning of the barbarous jargon tolerably intelligible. In my present remarks I do not propose an exhaustive discussion, but merely to suggest—

1stly, an answer to a prominent argument; 2ndly, to deprecate prima facie conclusions on the part of the non-Aryan school; and 3rdly, to indicate a

The one is the name of a

the dialect of the vulgar. In fact they are really what would now be ordinarily called des'i ; only with this material difference, that although of vulgar descent they have been formally adopted into the Sanskrit family. Thus it will be ob served that the scholiast does not, as with the

other two classes, give a word as an explanation of the term des'i, but a dialect, the Mahārāshtri.

mode of illustration which I conceive may be

Hence I infer that the original text of the

employed with great effect in support of the opposite theory. It is asserted that the earliest native gramma rians distinctly recognise the presence of a des'i or non-Aryan element in the different Prākrits; as for example, the line in the Kāvya-chandrikā :

Kāvyachandrikſi involves two orders of subdivi sion, the one of words into tatsama and tad

Tadbhavam, tat-samam, desity, anekam prakritam viduh, upon which the scholiast's remarks are as

follows: “ Tadbhavah Sanskrita-bhavah, khag gādi s'abdah,” “Tad-bhava means derived from

Sanskrit, as Khagga for Khadga, and so on.” Tatsamah Sanskrita-prakritayoh samah, hindira handi ity/idi s'abdah. “Tatsama means the words which are alike in Sanskrit and Prākrit, as hindira, a cuttle fish bone, hande, a mode of

address, &c.” Des'i iti maháráshtriyādi. “Desi is the name of the Mahārāshtri, &c.” We may confine our attention exclusively to the above passage, since it appears to be the original authority upon which the comments of all later

writers have been founded. The text is generally understood to mean that Prākrit words are of three

kinds; 1st, tad-bhava, derived from the Sans krit; 2ndly, tatsama, identical with the Sans

krit; and 3rdly,–des'i, i.e. provincial, or rather— to obviate all ambiguity of expression—non

Aryan ; since in the sense of local corruptions of

bhava, the other of dialects as Mahārāshtri, Sauraseni and the like, according to the country (des') in which they prevailed. To sum up, there are in all Prākrits two kinds of words ; the one called tad-bhava, corruptions from the Sanskrit ; the other called tatsama, words of vulgar origin, and mostly signifying local customs or productions, adopted into Sanskrit from the want of any exactly equivalent terms in that language. Thus medi aeval and ecclesiastical Latin, after it had be come a dead tongue, like classical Sanskrit, borrowed from the popular dialect, itself a cor ruption of Latin, many technical terms, which would be unintelligible to a Roman of the Augustan age, while they have also ceased to correspond with the current forms of every-day speech. Thus if the division is exhaustive, every Prākrit word, though not necessarily derived from the Sanskrit, still exists there ; allowance being made in the modern vernacular for the fact that a Prākrit term, when once transferred into Sanskrit composition, was stereotyped, while in current speech it continued subject to the

correct speech the tad-bhava words are consider

influence of progressive phonetic decay. The above considerations clearly explain why it is

ed to be provincial. But the illustrations given

that Lakshmidhara in his Shad-bhāshū-chandriká

by the scholiast appear to me to necessitate a

treats only of tad-bhava and tatsama terms;

very different conclusion. It may be presumed

since a third division with the title of desya had never been recognized. Thus much in

that in his time no Sanskrit word passed into the