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INTRODUCTION
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Elsewhere he writes, "The above are cases where we can look for Dravidian influence in the inherent principle of formation only quite legitimately. But in the development of NIA. post positions and affixes which took place towards the end of the first millennium A. C. and in the first Century of second millennium it would be too much to expect direct borrowing from Dravidian or building up on the model of Dravidian, as it has been suggested in a number of cases by various scholars.” 1
Here Dr. Chatterji admits the force of the objection that such borrowings are historically impossible and are nothing but instances of accidental coincidence.
The origin of the Prakrits and of their offspring-the Northern Indian Vernaculars Beames finds in the spoken Sanskrit as distinguished from the literary and to this he applies the term Middle Aryan.
Taking up the same line of investigatian Dr. J. Muir thus sums up the views of German scholars on the question of Sanskrit being a vernacular from which the Prakrits have later developed.
"It appears from the passages cited from the works of Professors Lassen and Benfey, that these distinguished scholars assume that Sanskrit (by which, no doubt, must be understood, a language, in some respects different from the later Sanskrit and more akin to the Vedic dialect) was once a spoken tongue regarding this as a fact which admits of no question. While Professor Weber is of opinion that the only Indo-Aryan speech which existed at the very early period to which I refer had not yet been developed into Sanskrit but was still a vernacular tongue.” ?
1 S. K. Chatterji, " The Origin and Development of the Bengali Language," Vol. I, p. 173.
• The Original Sanskrit Texts (1874), Vol. II, p. 144.
