CHAPTER II OUTLINES OF THE HISTORY OF SANSKRIT §i. The Vedic Language and the Classical Language About the pre-history of Indo-Aryan, both in India where it emerged as an independent form of speech, and outside India through the successive stages of Indo-Iranian and Indo-Euro- pean, much can be deduced, and deduced with certainty with the help of comparative philology. But of all these stages of the language no direct record is preserved. The historical period of the language begins— probably, as we have seen, round about the period 1200-1000 b.c,— with the composition and compila- tion of the Rgveda. From this time the literary tradition is con- tinuous and uninterrupted, and the gradual development of Indo- Aryan, through the various stages until the period of the modern languages is reached, can be followed in detail. During this period great changes have taken place, and their operation has been continuous throughout the whole period. By all this change and development Sanskrit has been affected only to a small extent. From the beginning; from the time of the composition of the Vedic hymns and the establishment thereby of a recognised literary language, there was a strong tendency among the Brahmins, the guardians of this literature and of the religious and social system that went with it, to pre- serve the language against change. This applied not only to the preservation of the sacred texts themselves, which have been handed down with scrupulous accuracy by oral tradition, or to the composition of literary works on ancient models, but also to the language of everyday speech among the Brahmins, and in the royal courts w r ith which they were always closely associated* This led to a growing divergence between the language of the educated classes and that of the people, which was subject to a fairly rapid alteration in the direction of Middle Indo-Aryan from an early period. 35
