Proceedings of the Seminar on Prakrit Studies 1973

Author(s): K R Chandra, Dalsukh Malvania, Nagin J Shah
Publisher: L D Indology Ahmedabad

Page 94

12. The Study of Prakrit Grammar for understanding.
the Tadbhava Words in Kannada
P. B. Badiger, Mysore.
Languages, like cultures, are rarely sufficient unto themselves. The necessities of contact bring the speakers of one language into direct or indirect contact with those of neighbouring or culturally dominant languages. The contact may be friendly or hostile. It may move on the humdrum plane of business and trade relations or it may consist of borrowing literary influence or interchange of spiritual goods-art, science, religion etc. It would be difficult to point to a completely isolated language or dialect. Whatever the degree or nature of contact between neighbouring peoples, it is generally sufficient to lead to some kind of linguistic inter-influencing. Frequently the influence runs heavily in one direction. The language of a people that is looked upon as a centre of a culture is naturally far more likely to exert an appreciable influence on other languages spoken in its vicinity than to be influenced by them.
The simplest kind of influence that one language may exert on another is the “borrowing" (or parellel changes to suit the genesis of borrowing languages) of words. The associated words are borrowed along with cultural borrowing. Each cultural wave brings to the language a new deposit of loan-words. In such a situation one can take a note of the extent to which the vocabularies of various people have filtered into those of other peoples.
It is generally assumed that the nature and extent of borrowing depend entirely on the historical facts of cultural relation. It seems very probable that the psychological attitude of the borrowing language itself towards linguistic material has much to do with its receptivity to foreign words. The borrowing language reacts to the presence of foreign words, it may reject them, it may translate them or it may freely accept them.
The borrowing of foreign words always entails their phonetic modifications. There are sure to be foreigo sounds or accentual peculiarities which do not fit the native phonetic habits. They are then so changed as to do as little violence as possible to their habits. Frequently, there are phonetic compromises.
In view of the above facts, if we examine closely the Kannada vocabu. lary, we feel assured that it has borrowed largely from Sanskrit (more in