Prolegomena to Prakritica et Jainica

Author(s): Satyaranjan Banerjee
Publisher: Asiatic Society

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PROLEGOMENA TO PRAKRITICA et JAINICA
its members, when a literary language owing to its divergence from the popular speech ceases to be intelligible to the people it is discarded and becomes a dead language. The need is then felt for creating new literary languages which arise from the stream of popular dialects intelligible to the people of those particular ages and after a short career die again like their predecessors. The history of the origin of Sanskrit, Prakrit and the modern IndoAryan vernaculars illustrates this law of development of spoken and literary languages. The Indo-Aryan vernaculars of the successive ages, the spoken Prakrits form the everflowing parent stream. The literary languages of those ages—Vedic, Classical Sanskrit, Pali, Ardhamagadhi, the Prakrit dialects of the plays, the literary Apabhraíśas, the modern Aryan vernaculars of India in their literary forms were all created successively from the spoken Prakrits of their own ages of the different provinces when the older literary languages became unintelligible and dead. Thus the new science of Coinparative Philology confirms the view of Vākpatirāja and Namisādhu expressed more than a millennium ago that the spoken Prakrits are the source of the literary languages.
2. The presence of Prakritisms in the Vedas proves that there were spoken Prakrits even in the Vedic age which have been lost not being preserved in literature and the later literary Prakrits must have been descended from these earlier spoken Prakrits and not from Vedic which is a literary language nor from the later Classical Sanskrit, the divergence from which of the literary Prakrits is much greater than from the Vedic Sanskrit.
3. Tadbhava words differ from Tatsamas in three respects. First, by absence of certain letters found in the Sanskrit form. Second, by presence of certain other letters in place of those found in the Sanskrit form. Third, by the presence of additional letters not found in the Sanskrit form. The first class of difference is called by Prakrit