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Introduction 1
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between the Dravidian and the so-called Modern Aryan languages. These latter show some other affinities with the Dravidian family. The employment of the same suffixes in both the numbers of the cases, of post-positions in the place of Sanskrit prepositions, the formation of tenses by the help of participles, the absence of a regular passive voice and the dative suffix with a K are all common to the two groups of languages. It is one of the fundamental assumptions of Comparative Philology that, as a general rule, ono language may borrow words and idioms from another to any extent, but it does not adopt the morphological structure of another - i.e. the inflexions or methods of word-formation and syntax. These two sets of languages have incorporated Sanskrit or Aryan words to a great extent and the so-called Modern Aryan languages have gone a step further and borrowed many suffixes along with them, just as the English language, with the wholesale adoption of Latin words, has borrowed certain Latin plurals and the Latin structure of sentences. Owing to this difference in grammatical structure, we have to assign the Dravidian languages and the so-called Modern Aryan languages to a family different from the Indo-European, In such a case, although it is probable that many desī words are Aryan, though not Sanskritic, in origin, there must remain a small residue of them, however small it may be, which has to be referred to the Dravidian source. The Aryans on entering our country found it already occupied by people of a different race and after a struggle extending over inany centuries, they obtained possession of the major portion of the country. Some of the preoccupants might lave mingled with them and to some extent influenced their language. The Aryans, being intellectually superior to the conquered races, did not allow the words of their own language to die out although they adopted the words of the conquered, and this accounts for the fact that the two words, the Aryan and the non-Aryan-desi, are found side by side in the Prakrits.
We thus arrive at the following conception of the expression desi, Many of them are of Sanskritic origin ; but owing to the large amount of corruption they have undergone during the many centuries of their use, they do not conform to the phonetic laws recognised by the grammarians or in other words their connection with Sanskrit is obscured. Some others again may be of Indo-European though not of Sanskritic origin and may be found, with slight variations, in the spoken dialects of other Indo-European races. A small proportion of them are of non-Indo-European descent and may have been obtained from the language of the people who were inhabiting the country before the advent of the Aryans into it. In Hemacandra's desi, a few recent borrowings from Persian and Arabic are also included, as they might have become current in the language of the country some centuries before his time. He is perfectly justified in doing so, as we have seen that desi has come to mean not only the words current in the country but at the same time show no trace of connection with Sanskrit.
In assigning meanings to desi words Hemacandra frequently differs from other lexicographers. He suys that in many cases his predecessors
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