Page:The history of the Bengali language (1920).pdf/221

Rh the speakers of the Prākṛta tongues, could not but draw upon Sanskrit for want of a living literary tradition of the Prākṛtas, when they sought from time to time to enrich their dialects.

It became impossible in those days to write in any particular vernacular of the province which might be intelligible to the people of all the provinces. The Buddhistic writers, who wanted to adhere to the Prākṛta speech, but found Pāli could not be made intelligible even in the Magadha country, mixed up Sanskrit forms with some অপভ্রংশ forms common to many provinces, and thereby created a curious hybrid language, which has acquired the designation, the Gāthā language. It was to ensure universal intelligibility that an artificial literary Prākṛta was set up, and it is the artificial Prākṛta, which is generally met with, in the old Prākṛta works. These Prākṛta works do not give us the real vernaculars of the past time, and so we cannot directly trace the evolution of our modern vernaculars through the speeches preserved in those works.

It is perfectly certain that the language of the Aśoka inscriptions is not artificial; but one thing strikes us very much, that there are many words in these inscriptions, which are more Sanskritic in form than the words occurring in Buddhistic canonical works. I am strongly inclined to think, that some words in the inscriptions were made purposely Sanskritic to make the edicts thoroughly intelligible at places far away from Magadha. If we compare the Pāli language of Buddha's days, as preserved in the canonical works, with the contemporary classical Sanskrit of the Brāhmaṇa literature, we may notice, that the latter artificial language cannot be said to be only the literary form of the former; but the classical Sanskrit of the 3rd Century B. C, can be easily set down as the literary form of the language of the inscriptions. Mr. F. W. Thomas