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tled. Englishmen probably pronounced would and could much as they do now. But some one knew there had been an in the earlier form of would (as in the German wollte). And so he spelt it with an 7, which no longer existed in the real, living speech. Somebody else (who thought he would be quite learned, and proper, and on the safe side), spelt could also with an 7, though the / existed, in this case, neither in the older form of the word nor in the living speech. And now we are saddled with the in both words whether we like it or not. It was this latter tendency which won the day in India. Very gradually the efforts to represent the real facts of the language gave way to another effort altogether, the effort to give expression to the learned phraseology. The past history of the words came to be considered more than their actual sound. Both the language in the inscriptions, and the methods of spelling adopted in them, became more and more artificial. The double process went on through the centuries, until at last, at the very time when the alphabet had been so continually improved that it had become the most perfect instrument of phonetic expression the world has yet seen, the other process had also reached its climax, the living speech had completely disappeared from the monuments, and all the inscriptions are recorded in a dead language, in the so-called classical Sanskrit. The oldest inscription in pure Sanskrit so far discovered, that of Rudradāman at Girnar in the Kathiawad, is dated (no doubt in the Saka Era) in the year 72. It belongs, therefore, to the middle of
Shree Sudharmaswami Gyanbhandar-Umara, Surat
BUDDHIST INDIA
www.umaragyanbhandar.com
