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remained true to the old type. With the race or races who occupied the greater portion of Northern India in primitive times the case is different. These came at a very early period into direct contact with the encroaching Aryans, and here we find a state of things quite analogous to that which obtained in those parts of Europe into which Roman soldiers and Roman settlers succesfully penetrated. The Romance languages may well be called Prakrits of Latin, and there can be little doubt that the history of these new languages in Europe is closely akin to that of the rise of the Middle Indian languages of India. In each case a period of more or less complete bilingualism must have preceded the establishment of the supremacy of the invading speech; and in each case the victorious language emerged greatly modified by the speech habits of the invaded areas. In Prakrits and in the Romance languages the local sounds, the local idioms, the local sentence-structure made their influence felt upon the adopted speech.". In support of his statement, Mr. M. Collins gives certain resemblances which, he adds, amongst others point unmistakably to the existence of a Dravadic substratum in the languages of Northern India.
Mr. Bejaychandra Majumdar, in his “History of the Bengali Language " adopts this view of Dravidian influence both in phonology and morphology of Bengali. He writes - "such an eminent scholar as Sir Ramkrishna Gopal Bhandarkar considers such changes in the oldest known Prakrit as ধম্মে for ধৰ্ম্ম, সঙ্কপ্পো for সঙ্কল্প, সিলােক for শ্লোক etc., to be due to the natural vocal tendencies of the Aryan speakers themselves. Explanation for these changes was not
1 Remarks of Mr. M. Collins quoted by S. A. Pillai, M.A., L. T. in his Dravidic Studies No. III-"The Sanskritic elements in the Vocabularies of the Dravidian Languages" (1919), pp. 56-57.
