SANSKRIT, PRAKRIT, AND APABHRANCA i . The Origin of Sanskrit
SOMETIME in the course of the second millennium B.C. Indo-European tribes occupied, in varying degrees of com- pleteness, vast areas in Iran, Asia Minor, and north-west India. 1 The problems of their movements and affiliations are still far from solution, but on linguistic grounds we postulate a group conveniently styled Aryan, whose speech can be regarded as the ancestor of the speeches of India and Iran. Of these Indian speeches" our oldest evidence is the Rgveda, and the language of this great collection of hymns is obviously a hieratic and conventional one. It testifies to the cultivation of sacred poetry by rival families of priests among many distinct tribes during a considerable period of time, and in various localities. Some of the hymns were doubtless composed in the Punjab, others in the region which in the Brahmanas is recognized as the home of the Kurus and Paficalas, tribes representing the con- solidation of units familiar to us in the Rgveda. It is even claimed that Book vi is the poetry of the period before the tribes entered India proper, though the contention is still implausible. That, under these circumstances, the speech of the Rgveda should show dialectic mixture is only to be expected, and, despite the great difficulties involving the attempt to discriminate, some progress is possible towards determining the characteristics of the dialect which lies at the basis of the Rgveda. It was marked by the open pronunciation of intervocalic d/i, bit, d, and dh as h, I, and Ih ; by the change of / into r ; and by the intrusion of the pronominal instrumental plural termination ebhis into the
1 Cf. Keith, Religion and Philosophy of the Veda, Chap. I.
2 Cf. V ackernagel, Altind. Gramm., i, pp. lxff. ; H. Reichelt, Festschrift Strett- berg (1924), pp. 238 £T. ; Macdonell, Vedic Grammar (1910); Meillet, IF. xxxi. i2off. ; JA. 1910, li. 184 IT.; Mllanges Livi, p. 20; Grammont, MSL. xix. 354 ff. ; Bloch, Formation de la langue maratke (1920); S. K. Chatterji, Bengali (1926).
B 2
