पृष्ठम्:The Sanskrit Language (T.Burrow).djvu/५१

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44 OUTLINES OF THE HISTORY OF SANSKRIT Rgveda .from classical Sanskrit is very much greater than that separating the language of even the earliest prose texts from it. The later Samhitas can be shown on the basis of language to be later in date than the Rgveda, and within that work itself the tenth book is known to be the latest for the same reason. In the same way a chronological distinction can be made between earlier and later Brahmanas. Since the Brahmanas are in prose, their language may be taken as reasonably representative of the spoken language of the upper classes in the later Vedic period. It still retains pre- classical features., such as the use of the old subjunctive, but already the majority of the old Vedic forms have fallen into disuse. By the time of the composition of the Sutras the lan- guage has reached in all essentials the stage at which it was codified by Panini. In all the Sutras it is possible to find grammatical forms which do not conform strictly to the Paninean rules. But in contrast to the earlier literature these forms are not as a rule archaisms. The difference is rather that their usage is somewhat more lax and careless than that allowed by the strict formulation of the grammarians, and in this respect they accurately reflect the spoken usage of the period of Panini himself and of the period immediately pre- ceding. Their language is based, not like the later classical Sanskrit on an established and traditional grammatical system, but on that same spoken language of the educated Brahmins, which is the source of the grammatical system of Panini, These texts are very important in linguistic history : they stand side by side with Panini as an independent authority on the living Sanskrit language during the period immediately preceding its final codification. It is here, and not in the later literature, that we must look for a living illustration of the lan- guage that Panini established in its final form. §2. Old Indo-Aryan The Sanskrit language, in its Vedic and Classical form, had, as already observed, a definite geographical location. In the very earliest period this lay in the Punjab, but the centre soon moved eastward to the countries of Kuru and Pancala, and there it remained during the whole later Vedic period. Certain dialectal divergencies between the language of the Rgveda and that of the later literature — notably the use of l instead of Vedic