58
SANSKRIT STUDIES
The consequence is that when you ask the Pandit to trace the development of an idea or the changes in the form of an ex- pression, he fails altogether. He is generally satisfied with an explanation of a thing as it is found in a particular stage of its evolution. He does not ordinarily recognize anything as having passed through successive stages of growth or decay. In other words, time finds no place in his conception of knowledge. It is the duty of the modern student to supplement this deficiency in the old learning and I may illustrate how this may be done by means of one or two simple examples.
We have in Sanskrit a word vigra of which the meaning is thus defined by Amara : vigro vigatanasikah. We get no
explanation of this word in Panini, but one of his followers, probably Katyayana, by whose time the word must have come into ordinary use, explains its formation by stating that gra> the second syllable in it, is a substitute for nasika . It is hard for us, with our notion of etymology, to understand how the single syllable gra came to take the place of the trisyllabic nasika with which it has no phonetic kinship whatever. Can we suggest any satisfactory derivation ? We can, if we only recognize what is a commonplace^ of modern Philology, that languages change constantly and, as a result of change, show growth or decay in their various elements. The recogni- tion of this truth will help us to connect the syllable g ra in the word we are considering with the well-known root ghra which means ‘to smell’ and which is found in the word vyaghra ,
- tiger’, literally ‘the smelling animal’. The original form of
our word was probably vighra of which the second syllable underwent, in course of time, a modification in pronunciation and became de-aspirated. It is thus not a substitute for nasika as Katyayana has it, but only a worn out form of ghra . Although the explanation is so easy, the ancient grammarian missed it, because he ignored the possibility of change in language and thought that linguistic facts continued, through all time, to retain, what he assumed to be, their ready-made forms.
I have illustrated my point by taking the form of a word into consideration. It is equally easy to give an example where the change affects its meaning or content. All of us know the old story about Indra clipping the wings of mountains which, as it is said, could fly in olden days and played havoc by
