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APPENDIX.
nacular tongues, all their really ancient and standard works are written in the Mágadhí. It is a curious fact, that the Ceylonese Buddhists term their sacred tongue, usually called Pali, also Mágadhí; though on comparing the Mahavanso, one of their sacred books, with the Jain writings, I find considerable dissimilarity between the two dialects; the Pali approaching much nearer to the standard of the general Prákrit, and having few, if any, of the peculiarities of the Mágadhí dialect, while the Jain works exhibit them by no means in a slight degree. The Mahávanso probably exhibits, pretty nearly, the court language of India three hundred years before our era, when Buddhism was first firmly established in Ceylon, while the language of the Kalpa Sútra was the court language of the Balabhi monarchs of Gujarath seven centuries later; for although the two works were probably composed about the same period, the language all the while in Ceylon being a dead language, and its use confined to the priesthood, it would remain unaffected by those changes to which in India, as a spoken tongue, it would be continually subjected. In reference to the meaning of the word Prákrit, it may be observed that, among the Maráthi Brahmans, the term is often taken in its widest sense to signify the natural or vernacular language of any province in India. In a more restricted sense, it means any of the ancient dialects of the different provinces, and which, as most of their books used till lately to be written in it, obtains, in the south of India, the appellation Grantha. The Sanskrit is not at present
