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AUGUST, 1892.]
THE INSCRIPTIONS OF PIYADASI.
245
Satrap king Budradaman, at Girnar. The inscription of Jagdhan, datod 127, and consequently 50 years later, emanating from the grandson of Rudradaman, only returns to the mistakes of Mixed Sanskrit in a few details. 61
What is precisely this Mixed Sanskrit P
Various attempts have been made to explain its existence and its peculiarities. It has been held to be a dialect intermediate between the ancient period of Sanskrit and the more modern period of the Prakrits; a sort of jargon created by ignorance or, if it is preferred, by incomplete knowledge on the part of the people, their ambition being incommeasurate with their powers, who wished to give themselves the honour of writing in the literary language, withont possessing a safficient acquaintance with it (Burnout); - the special dialect of bards, who appear to bave taken a middle course between the popular speech and the learned language, in order to make themselvos intelligible, without too great derogation, to their audience (RajendralAla Mitra).
Neither of these explanations, taken alone and in the exact meaning which was intended by its author, can be reconciled with facts as they are known to us at the present day.
The conjecture of Burnoaf was an excellent explanation, when he seemed to be dealing with only a few stanzas lost in a vast literature. We can no longer attribute to the pedantry of an editor or of a clumsy scribe a language which is employed on a vast scale, and applied to royal inscriptions, and we are unable to explain by & valgar ignorance & mixture, which rather appears to bear witness to an extensive acquaintance with the literary language.
It is no more possible to represent, as a special poetical language, a dialect which is fluently used in the inscriptions, and which is employed in lengthy prose works and even in didactic treatises.
As for seeing in Mixed Sansksit the direct expression of the current language at a certain period of its development, the theory hardly deserves the trouble of refatation. A dialect so void of all stability, at one moment closely resembling classical Sanskrit, and at another very different from it, & dialect which brings together, in complete confusion and in arbitrary proportions, phonetic phenomena which belong to most anequal degrees of linguistic development, could never be a faithful echo of the popular language at any epoch whatever. Mixed Sanskrit is, neither in its grammar nor in its phonetics, intermediata between Sanskrit and the Prakrits; it constitutes an incoherent mixture of forms purely Sanskrit and of forms purely Prakrit, which is an altogether different thing.
Mixed Sanskrit has, moreover, a history. In the chronological series of monuments which it is represented, far from shewing signs of gradually increasing phonetic decay, it continues to approach more and more nearly to classical orthography and to classical forms. In the inscriptions of Mathura, the remnants of Prâkpit orthography are so rare, that the general appearance as a whole is that of pure Sanskrit.02
This observation comes to our Assistance in answering the question which we have before ns. It is not sufficient to know what Mixed Sanskrit is not. We must determine what it is.
Towards the end of the 2nd century, we find upon the monuments three dialects which, in their phonetic condition, appear to correspond to different ages of the physiological development of the language : Sanskrit, Mixed Sanskrit, and Prakfit. All three are destined in the future to continue ooncurrently in literature. Here we find them used side by side, at the same time, and at the same places. It is inadmissible to suppose that they represent contemporary states of the vulgar tongue; at most, that conld be represented only by the most corrupted of the three, dialects, the Prakṣit. As for Mixed Sanskrit, like
Arch. Suru. West, Ind. III. p. 128.
Hoernle, Ind. Ant. 1883, p. 32. This gradation becomes still more evident if, as we ought to do, we take as our point of departure the inscriptions of Piyadasi at Girder and at Kapur di Giri.
