Prolegomena to Prakritica et Jainica

Author(s): Satyaranjan Banerjee
Publisher: Asiatic Society

Page 24

BANERJEE : ORIGIN OF PRAKRIT
Synthetic Prakrits and Sanskrit"? is found in the development of the Romance languages Italian, French, Spanish and Portuguese from Latin. If this is possible in Europe purely by a power of internal development why in India to explain the same phenomenon the influence of Non-Aryan languages should be considered as necessary, is not comprehensible.
Mr. M. Collins, in his remarks on "The Sanskritic elements in the Vocabularies of the Dravidian Languages" by S.A. Pillai, detects a Dravidic substratum in the structure of languages of Northern India as would be seen from the following extract :
"These borrowings (i.e., from Sanskrit) whatever modifications they may present, affect only the vocabulary. In structure the Dravidian languages of the South have remained true to the old type. With the race or races who occupied the greater portion of Northern India in primitive times the case is different. These came at a very early period into direct contact with the encroaching Aryans, and here we find a state of things quite analogous to that which obtained in those parts of Europe into which Roman soldiers and Roman settlers successfully penetrated. The Romance languages may well be called Prakrits of Latin, and there can be little doubt that the history of these new languages in Europe is closely akin to that of the rise of the Middle Indian languages of India. In each case a period of more or less complete bilingualism must have preceded the establishment of the supremacy of the invading speech; and in each case the victorious language emerged greatly modified by the speech habits of the invaded areas. In Prakrits and in the Romance languages the local sounds, the local idioms, the local sentence-structure made their influence felt upon the adopted speech."18 In support of
17. By Sanskrit is meant here the spoken Vedic, the proto
type of Sanskrit. 18. Remarks of Mr. M. Collins quoted by S.A. Pillai, M.A., L.