________________
INTRODUCTION
xix
language still retaining its inflexional character from an agglutinative family philologically possible? Where is the precedent or analogy for it? Is it not more reasonable to suppose that the modern Indo-Aryan vernaculars are the lineal descendants of the Prakrits which are mainly synthetic and inflexional but sometimes show an analytical tendency which has fully developed in their next stage which is represented by the Modern Indian Vernaculars ?
So long as a linguistic phenomenon can be accounted for by the laws of internal development of a language there is no justification for ascribing it to extraneous influences. The development of analytical character is only a stage in the development of synthetical languages and is found where synthetic families of languages have been in existence. An exact parallel to the development of the analytical modern Indo-Aryan vernaculars from the Synthetic Prakrits, and Sanskrit is found in the development of the Romance languages-Italian, French, Spanish and Portuguese from Latin. If this is possible in Europe purely by a power of internal development why in India to explain the same phenomenon the influence of Non-Aryan languages should be considered as necessary, is not comprehensible.
Mr. M. Collins, in his remarks on “The Sanskritic elements in the Vocabularies of the Dravidian Languages" by S. A. Pillai, detects a Dravidic substratum in the structure of languages of Northern India as would be seen from the following extract :
"These borrowings (i.e., from Sanskrit) whatever modifications they may present, affect only the vocabulary. In structure the Dravidian languages of the South have
1 By Sanskrit is meant here the spoken Vedic, the proto-type of Sanskrit.
