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2. Late non-standard Sanskrit usages
General Considerations (1) For a literary language like Classical Sanskrit, which has been used to produce enormous literature for some two thousand five hundred years, and which later on has coexisted with several other allied or non-allied literary languages current over driverse regions of India, it was quite inevitable and a sine-qua-non for existence to have been subject to continuous variation and varied types and amounts of linguistic influences. The non-standard Sanskrit words and experssions discussed below can be taken to represent a trend in the language of Sanskrit works written in the middle Classical period (say from eighth to eleventh century A. C.). From the early centuries of the Christian era, through the works of poets like Rājasekhara and the Kashmereans Somadeva, Kalhaņa and specially Ksemendra, down to the Jain Kathā works and Prabandhas which continued to be written till the seventeenth century we have forms of Sanskrit with highly varying degree and type of admixture of Prakritic, colloquial or rare, archaic usages. Within this vast domain, apart from the language of the epics and Purāņas, the Sanskrit termed Buddhist Hybrid (or Mixed) Sanskrit and Jain Sanskrit has attracted special attention (the latter, because of its increasingly abundant use of Prakritisms and regional colloquialisms). It is however quite evident that to deal with many types and varicties of Sanskrit we would require several terms like Mixed Sanskrit, Desya Sanskrit, Prakritized or Vernacularized Sanskrit, Hybrid Sanskrit etc. which may have to be subcategorized, depending upon numerous fcctors that would include regional base and stylistic trends. Theoretically also the reference frame with precise classification of the notions of ‘mixed language', 'adstrata'. ‘Pidginization', 'Creolization', 'convergence etc. shall have to be worked out in the present context.
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