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10
Desinūmamülni.
mitted that Classical Sanskrit from which the grammarians derive the Prakrits is the literary form of a slightly different colloquial language, which is in fact the parent of the Prakrits. Some of these desya words may have existed in the colloquial language before the Prakrits came into existence and might have been inherited by them from that language, and as the colloquial language was never admitted into literature, its words have not survived to us. We may also suppose that the Aryans came into India in successive waves but not all at once. In the interval between two successive waves certain words may have gone out of use in the original home or at an intermediate station. The people who entered this country in the early period may have retained words which have been given up by subsequent batches before they came to our country. Both the above classes of words, as Mr. J. Beames observed in his Comparative Grammar of Modern Aryan Languages of India (p. 24) "though not used in Indian literature, may have been in use in the mouths of the people and may be current under some slight disguise in the mouths of Lithuanain peasants even yet." It is, therefore, possible to suppose, from the nature of the desya words, that they too are Aryan or Indo-European in origin and that they have left us no trace of their existence in Classical Sanskrit. In the case of some words, the relation between them and their Sanskrit prototypes may have been obliterated by the changes brought about by time and we are not able to discern the resemblance between the mother and the daughter though they stand beside each other before our eyes. This fact is brought home to us by the fact that the number of desi words in & language varies in inverse ratio with the knowledge of Sanskrit and Prakrit possessed by the grainmarians. Thus Homacandra derives a large nunber of Prakrit words from Sanskrit, which according to other grammariaus are pure deśyas; and may not what appeared to be a desya word to Hemacandra appear as a tadbhava to another?
We have seen above that some of the desya words are common to the Prakrits or the Indo-European vernaculars and the Dravidian dialects. In the Dravidian languages, the desī words are considered as the distinctive or characteristic part of their vocabulary. But the above view of the origin of deśya words deprives these languages of what is considered as their heritage and makes the desya words loans from the neighbouring Indo-European vernaculars, and places them on a level with the tadbhavas and tatsamas. It, therefore, results that the whole voeabulary of the Dravidian languages is derived from the Indo-European source. The interrelations between the Dravidian and the Indo-European family of languages become closer and the Dravidians appear to be only the earliest wave of the Aryans to come to our country. This is the view of some Dravidian philologists in Southern India. But the grammatical structure of the Dravidian languages tells against the above conclusion. The Dravidian system of sentence formation, in which the finite verb always stands at the end is opposed to the Indo-European way in which the order of words counts for very little ; but in this respect there is complete agreement
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