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xxiv
DEŠĪNĀMAMĀLĀ
Weber's own words have thus been translated by Muir-"In its earliest period the Indo-Aryan speech had not yet become Sanskrit, i.e., the language of the cultivated men, but remained still a vernacular tongue, whilst in its second period the people spoke not Sanskrit but Prakritic dialects which had been developed out of the ancient Indo-Aryan vernacular contemporaneously with Sanskrit.”
The views of modern scholars on the origin of Deśyas are given below:
Beames gives the following account of the Deśajus :
“Desajas are those words which cannot be derived from any Sanskrit word and are therefore considered to have been borrowed from the aborigines of the country or invented by the Aryans in post-Sanskritic times." 3
A. F. R. Hoernle writes :
Native grammarians add the Desya as a third division to the 'tatsama' and 'tadbhava.' The term Desya means lit. belonging to the country, i.e., provincial or perhaps aboriginal, They designate by this name all these words which they are unable to drive satisfactorily to themselves from some Sanskrit word and therefore consider to have had their origin in the country (i.e., rure or provincia). In what way exactly they suppose them to have originated is not clear; namely whether borrowed from the aborigines or invented by the rustic Aryans themselves in Post-Sanskritic times (Beames, I, p. 12) or so corrupted by their common parlance from a Skr. original as to make them unrecognisable. The last seems to
1 Indische Literaturgeschichte, p. 1.
2 Beames, 'A Comparative Grammar of the Modern Aryan Languages of India" Vol. I, p. 12.
3 A Comperative Grammar of the Gauļian Languagos' (1880) Introduction, pp. xxxix -xl.
