5

morvaśī attributed to Kālidāsa, (both of which, though their precise age be disputed, appear to have been respectively composed, at the latest, about sixteen and fourteen hundred years ago,') together with several others. I have also referred to the examples given in the Prākṛit Grammar of Vararuchi, which is considered by Lassen to have been composed about eighteen hundred years ago, or rather in its commentary. An examination of the Prakrits which are found in these several works shows that the languages of India were then in a state of transition, and formed an intermediate link between the Sanskrit and the modern vernacular dialects. For whatever opinion we may entertain on the question whether the dramatic Prakrits were identical with any contemporaneous or earlier vernacular dialects, it is difficult to imagine that they had not a considerable resemblance to some of these. Even if some of the forms of the dramatic Prākṛits were purely literary and unknown in any of the spoken languages, they could scarcely have failed to bear some analogy to those of the latter; as, first, the inventors of those forms could hardly have had the ingenuity to devise entirely novel modifications of speech, or secondly, if they had, their compositions would have been thereby rendered unintelligible. The Prakrit forms of inflection and declension approach more to the Sanskrit than to the modern vernaculars; but yet exhibit a great

6

• Professor Wilson, reasoning from a variety of considerations, considers the Mrichhakati to have been probably composed in the interval between 100 в c. and the end of the second century A.D. (Introduction to the play, pp. 5-9.) The same writer thinks that the Vikramorvas'ī, which is regarded as the work of Kālidāsa, is more recent than the Mrichhakaṭī, but does not assign any probable date (Introd. to drama, pp. 185, 186). Lassen holds that the Mṛichhakaṭī was composed towards the end of the first century A.D., while the Vikramorvasi and the S'akuntalā (which last is also assigned to Kālidāsa) were composed in the second half of the second century A.D. (Ind. Alt. ii. p. 1160). Weber, on the other hand, in his latest notice of the subject in the Introduction to his Mālavikā and Agnimitra, pp. xxxiii, xl, places the age of Kalidasa, the author of Vikramorvasi and S'akuntala, at the close of the third century A.D. The Mrichhakaṭī is held by the same author to be not earlier than the second century A.D. (Ind. Stud. ii. 148).

Ind. Alterth., vol. ii. p. 1160.

6 It is quite conceivable that the Prākṛits employed in the earlier dramas may have continued to be the conventional forms in use in later works of the same kind, even after the provincial vernaculars to which they were most akin had been modified or superseded, —just as Latin. Sanskrit and Pali continued to be used for literary purposes after they had ceased to be spoken tongues.

breaking down and modification of the former.

I will give some

instances of this which will make my meaning clearer than any general statements. I do not think it necessary to distinguish here the different kinds of Prākṛit, which will be specified further on.

It is manifest that in these instances we see the intermediate forms which the words took in Prākṛit before they assumed the shapes in which we now find them in Hindi or Bengali, e.g., karma and käryya became in Prakrit respectively kamma and kajja, and finally in Hindī kām and kāj. The Sanskrit form rakshāmi (I keep) re-appears

in the Prākṛit rakkhāmi, with the compound consonant ksh changed into kkh, but with ami the final affix of the first person singular unchanged. In the modern vernacular the former change remains, but the word has undergone a farther modification, the peculiar affix of the first person singular āmi having disappeared in the Hindi rakhtā, which does not differ from the second and third persons. A fuller exemplification of the points in which the Prakṛits coincide with and diverge from the Sanskrit, on the one hand, and approximate to the modern vernaculars on the other, will be found in the tabular statement subjoined.

The books to which reference has been made in this statement are the following:-Mr. Cowell's Prākṛita Prakāśa of Vararuchi; Lassen's Institutiones Linguæ Pracritica; Delius's Radices Pracritica; the Mrichhakati, Stenzler's edition; the Sakuntala, Böhtlingk's edition; the Prabodha Chandrodaya, Brockhaus's edition; Mālavikā Agnimitra, Tullberg's edition; and the Vikramorvaśī, Calcutta edition."

7 Since the first edition of this work appeared, two dramas, the Prasannarāghava of Jayadeva, and the Bālarāmāyaṇa of Rajasekhara, have been printed by Pandit Govinda Deva S'astrī, in the Journal called "The Pandit," published at Benares, and separate copies of each have been struck off, bearing the dates of 1868 and 1869. Professor Weber has also published, in 1866, a Dissertation on the language of the Jaina work called "Bhagavati," which is a species of Präkṛit; and in 1870 the text, with a German translation, of the “Saptasataka of Hâla," as a “contribution to the knowledge of Prâkrit."

TABLE NO. I.

COMPARATIVE STATEMENT OF THE SANSKRIT, PRĀKṚIT, AND MODERN INDIAN LANGUAGES.8

This table (except as regards the transliteration of the Indian words), is reprinted nearly as it stands in the first edition, and without a renewed verification of the references in col. 1, the labour of which, I thought, would hardly have been repaid by correction of a few possible inaccuracies.

9 Here it deserves to be specially noted that the Sanskrit word undergoes the same changes in Prakrit and Hindi according to its two different meanings.

10 The Persian has the same form, with a b instead of the v.

11 Vararuchi gives the form vachchho, not vuchchha, which I find in the Mrichh., p. 73. 12 Rūksha is given in Wilson's dictionary as one of the Sanskrit words for a tree; but

it may have crept in from Prākṛit. Compare Böhtlingk and Roth, s.v.

13 This word is from the S'akārikā, one of the Apabhransa dialects. In ordinary Prakrit it would perhaps be sūaro or suaro. 14 Vonio Mrichh., 28 and 50.