xxvi PREFACE
much as he wrote it, and the officials of Acoka equally conversed in a speech essentially similar to that in which they wrote, while contemporaneously lower classes of the population spoke in dialects which were far further advanced in phonetic change. It is clear that the Aryan invaders succeeded in imposing their speech on many of the earlier inhabitants of the country, and there is no cogent argument to refute the natural belief that strange Prakritic forms, such as we find sporadically even in the Rgveda, when not mere later corruptions are often loan-words from class dialects with which the speakers of the more con- servative form of speech were in contact. The influence of lower speech-forms was doubtless of increasing importance, since it evoked the elaborate grammatical studies summed up in the Astddhyayi, testifying to the anxiety of the priests to preserve the Bhasa from corruption, and Patanjali's insistence 1 on the evils of barbarisms doubtless proves their occurrence. But there seems no ground for conceiving of the position as one in which the priests used a formal language only in their business, and discarded it for a true vernacular in daily life. There seems a very fair analogy with the standard English of the higher classes of society in this country; the East-end curate's true vernacular is standard English, though he ought to be able to adapt his speech to the comprehension of the dockers if he works at a mission, and a landowner's true vernacular is that which he habitually uses in his own circle, not that in which he talks familiarly to his farm workers or villagers of the old type, whose dialect often is as different from standard English as an old Prakrit from Sanskrit. The presence of many Sanskritized ver- sions of Prakrit terms, to which Zachariae 2 has suggested an interesting addition in the term protha? is a perfectly natural phenomenon where higher and lower speeches exist contem- poraneously in the same community, apart altogether from the further possibilities of speech mixture due to the development
1 So already Katjayana, Varttilca 12 on Panini, i. 3. 1. Skold's effort (IA. lv. 181 ff.) to piove l'anini older than the Rk Pratifdkhya cannot be accepted, for the reasons given by B. Liebich, Zur Einfuhi-ung in die ind. cinheim. Sprachwissenschaft, ii. 30 f,
' ZII. v. 328-31.
5 A variant for pdntham in the verse cited (from Bhasya on Panini, 1. 4. 56) below, p. 46 Kor the idea cf. Qakuntald, iv. (ed. Cappeller), p. 48.
