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INTRODUCTION
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literary languages became unintelligible and dead. Thus the new science of Comparative Philology confirms the view of Vākpatirājā and Namisādhu expressed more than a millennium ago that the spoken Prakrits are the source of the literary languages.
2. The presence of Prakritisms in the Vedas proves that there were spoken Prakrits even in the Vedic age which have been lost not being preserved in literature and the later literary Prakrits must have been descended from these earlier spoken Prakrits and not from Vedic which is á literary language nor from the later Classical Sanskrit, the divergence from which of the literary Prakrits is much greater than from the Vedic Sanskrit. These Prakritisms and affinities with Prakrit in the Vedas form a vast field of research and cannot be dealt with here and so are reserved for the second volume of this work.
3. Tadbhava words differ from Tatsamas in three respects. First, by absence of certain letters found in the Sanskrit form. Second, by presence of certain other letters in place of those found in the Sanskrit form. Third, by the presence of additional letters not found in the Sanskrit form. The first class of difference is called by Prakrit grammarians lopa' or elision, the second is called 'varṇādeśa' or substitution of letters, the third 'varṇāgama' or augment. As descriptions of purely grammatical processes without any reference to historical transformation, or geneology of words, the terms may be allowed. But if they are taken to mean a historical transformation of words from pre-existent Sanskrit into Prakrit arising in course of time they are not an exact representation of facts and are open to objection. Regarding lopa? it may be said, there are varying degrees of it found in the Tadbhavas -from slight decay as in the Asoka inscriptions or Pali to the disappearance of several intervocalic consonants reducing
