111 The Third lecture is on “Spoken Sanskrit”. By Spoken Sanskrit I mean something different from what Sanskrit scholars think. It is not Sanskrit as has been spoken from the days of Patañjali (and earlier) to our own times. It means that basic form of Old Indo-Aryan which was spoken by the people in general and which was the direct and immediate source of Middle Indo-Aryan. Mr. Walter Maurer first drew my attention to the importance of this “Spoken Sanskrit”. I dealt on the topic very briefly in my presidential address to the annual general meeting of the Linguistic Society of India held at Deccan College, Poona, in November 1956. Thanks to the University of Mysore, I have now been able to find an occasion to develop the theme. I may mention here that beside Buddhistic (Hybrid) Sanskrit this “Spoken Sanskrit” had another and a much more debased form. It was used all over India by the half-educated and by ill- baked scholars as a sort of “Dog" Sanskrit. There are few records of this speech worth mention, but there is one very late record of some length. It is the very interesting book entitled Sekaśubhodayā com- piled in Bengal sometime in the fifteenth or the sixteenth century. September, 2007) SUKUMAR SEN. September 21, 1957
