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Having finished as rapid a survey of the ancient languages of India as time permitted, I have to draw your attention to a statement in Dandin's Kāvyādarśa. There, he speaks of four languages, Samskṛta, Prākṛta, Apabhramsa and Miśra. This is not an enumeration, but I believe, a classification of languages under four heads. Sanskrit we know, - it does not require an explanation. But its subsequent history is interesting. After the composition of the Mahābhāṣya Sanskrit was confined to the Brahmins and the Brahminists. The Brahmins took great pains to make their language conform to the rules of Panini and Patanjali apāṇiniya and bhāṣyaviruddha expressions became a taboo. But they could not maintain this purity for a long time. The Buddhists began to change their mixed language into a sort of Sanskrit, which was definitely and distinctively apāṇiniya and bhasyaviruddha. There arose a sect among the Jainas, the Digāmbaras who also wrote in Sanskrit without studying Panini and the Mahābhāṣya. Many Brahminists also found it difficult to master all the niceties of the Panini School. Sanskrit began to take its leaven from the vernaculars. All this resulted in the 4th and the 5th centuries A.D. in the disappearance of the Mahābhāṣya altogether. Bhartṛhari in the 7th century speaks of the difficulty with which his Guru procured a copy of the Mahabhaṣya from the south. But from this time, the table was turned against the Brahmins. Buddhists began to write commentaries on Panini. They wanted to revive the study of Pāṇini sūtras and discard Katyayana and Patanjali. Thus was the Käsikā, a commentary on the sutras of Pāṇini written by two Buddhists, Vamana and Jayaditya. The commentary in its turn was commented upon by Jinendrabuddhi in what is called Käsikävrttipañjikā or the Nyāsa. Maitreya Rakṣita, another Buddhist wrote the Tantrapradipa, and last of all, when Lakṣmaṇasena, the last Hindu King of Bengal, wanted to revive Sanskrit learning he employed a Buddhist scholar for the work of compiling a Sanskrit grammar without the Vedic forms. He is Purusottama, the author of Bhaṣāvṛtti.
The Sistas of Patanjali who spoke in Sanskrit, gradually, as time passed on, dwindled and dwindled till in the 7th and the 8th centuries A.D. Sanskrit was no longer a spoken language. The accents, the emblem of a spoken language. The accents, the emblem of a spoken language ceased to interest grammarians, and the study of the Vedas, though revived by Kumārila in the 8th century, could not revive the science of pronunciation, and Sanskrit grammars written after that time have discarded the Vedic and the Svaras. The various schools of grammar now current do not even take a complete survey of the classical language. Their aims seem to be to
] तुलसी प्रज्ञा अंक 116 117
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