104
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
