42 OUTLINES OF THE HISTORY OF SANSKRIT the meaning of many Vedic words, with the result that the authors were frequently reduced to guessing. The same applies to the later commentatorial works culminating in the great Bhasya of Sayana. In modern times the labours of scholars, equipped with greater resources than the ancients, have done much to reduce the field of uncertainty, but even now there remains over a considerable amount of material which defies certain interpretation. In contrast to the losses of the old vocabulary, classical San- skrit has acquired a large number of new words from various sources. These gains far more than counterbalance the losses, and the vocabulary of classical Sanskrit is one of the richest known. Of course there are many words which appear first in the later language and at the same time belong to the most ancient layer of Indo-Aryan. The absence of such words from the older texts is partly accidental, since, extensive though they are, the Vedic texts do not contain the whole linguistic material of pre-classical Sanskrit. Partly also it is a question of dialect ; the widening of the horizon in the case of later as opposed to Vedic Sanskrit led to the inclusion of Old Indo-Aryan material which may not have been current in the dialects which underlay the early standard language. For instance the adverb parut ' last year' is not recorded before Panini, but it is an ancient IE word as is shown by the Greek equivalent Trcpum. Similarly the related pardri ‘ year before last 1 is, we may be sure, absent from the early texts only by accident. There are many words which must be ancient because their formation is of an ancient type, e.g, vipula - ' abundant 1 from the root pf- ' to fill In this case the preservation of IE l , elsewhere not found with this root, suggests that its absence from the early Vedic texts is a matter of dialect. A large number of the new words are fresh formations based on the existing stock of roots and formatives. As long as the suffixes of derivation retained their living character, there was ample scope for the creation of new terms as occasion demanded. This was particularly so since it was combined with the facility of compounding verbal roots with prepositional prefixes, and in this way terms could be created at will for any conceivable need. From the root kr- 4 to do ' alone, by means of the suffixes of derivation, and with the help of Some score of prepositional prefixes, many hundreds of words were manufactured, whose meanings cover every field of practical and theoretical expression.
