Indian Antiquary Vol 60

Author(s): Richard Carnac Temple, Charles E A W Oldham, S Krishnaswami Aiyangar, Devadatta Ramkrishna Bhandarka
Publisher: Swati Publications

Page 352

$$ 58-59 ]
ON THE MODERN INDO-ARYAN VERNACULARS
SEPTEMBER, 1931
58. The particular phase which the Secondary Prakrits had reached at this time was that of which Pāli is the literary representative. As vernaculars they continued their course of development, and, in various dialects, entered the phase of Prakrit kar' toxuv. When we speak of Prakrit' without qualification, we mean this later phase of the Secondary Prakrits, when they had developed beyond the phase of Pāli, and before they had reached the analytic stage of the IAVA.
59. These Prakrits became, in later times and under the influence of religious and political causes, the subject of literary study. Poems and religious works were written in them, and they were freely used in the drama. Grammars of the various dialects were written by contemporaries or by men who lived a comparatively short time after they had become dead languages. Here again we see the same Indian proclivity to turning tendencies into, or even to use exceptional occurrences as the bases of, general rules. The Prakrit spoken was bound by only one universal rule,--the convenience of the speakers,-but the grammars and the literature based upon them altered this speech in important particulars. The writers omitted what they considered to be vulgar, reduced wild luxuriance to classical uniformity, and thus created artificial products suited for the artificial literature which has ever been popu. lar in India. For instance, the laws of the development of the language created a tendency to drop medial consonants. The grammarians made this & universal rule for certain consonants, so that, e.g., mata-, mada-, maya-, mrga-, and mpta-, all became maa-, and kako-, kāca, and kaya, all became kāa. Such a language must have failed to fulfil the main purpose of any language,-that of conveying intelligible thought, and could never have existed as a general means of communication. That there was a tendency to drop such medial consonants is certain, but various automatic devices came at the same time into being that preserved intelligibility at the cost of that consistency on which the gramma. rians set so great a store. One of these was to arrest the phonetio development of a word at that particular point at which its further development would have led to its confusion with another word. As an example, take the word käka- given above. The ordinary course of development would have been käka > kāga-> kāa-. We have proofs from the IAVS. that development in the mouths of most Indians stopped at käga-. The genius of the vernacular felt that kāa- would lead to confusion, and resisted the tendency towards phonetic indolence that urged it to drop the g. It has accordingly kāga- unchanged down to the modern Hindi, where it still appears under the form of käg, in spite of the efforts of the long series of Prakrit grammarians. Other Indians, it is true, gave way to the tendency, but saved the cause of intelligibility by the use of pleonastic suffixes, of which a great variety were to hand. So in the case of kaa- (< kāga-), they distinguished the meaning of 'crow' by appending the sufix waa- ( ukaka-), and the word became kauaa-, which is the parent of the Hindi karwā. As for kaca-, it never lost its original form, for the order of development would have been kāca >, kāja-> kda-. But kāja- was already appropriated by lajja- or kāja- < kārya-, and hence the development of kaca- was stopped from the very first, and we have still kāc in modern Hindi, usually, but unnecessarily, described as a tatsama. (see below). Käycr alone really became kia- in the latest stage of the Secondary Prakrits. In short, too much stress cannot be laid on a fact which seems to have been ignored by many writers, that no language in the world has ever developed homogeneously on regular lines, as if it were a mathematical problem. At no stage is it possible to draw & line at which it will be found that all the words in use have arrived at the same stage of development. The most that we can say is that the majority have arrived at that stage, while, on the other hand, the development of many words has been retarded, or even hastened, by various causes such as desire for intelligibility, religious tradition, or political prejudice.
We must, however, credit the grammarians with expressly warning us that their rules are not universal. Cf. Hc. i, 2. See also Bhn. 77 noto, all these rules are general, not universal.'
34