THE ORIGIN OF SANSKRIT 5
the process was accentuated by the remarkable achievements of her early grammarians whose analytical skill far surpassed any- thing achieved until much later in the western world. In the normal life of language a constant round of destruction and reconstruction takes place; old modes of expression disappear but new are invented ; old distinctions of declension and con- jugation are wiped out, but new differentiations emerge. In Sanskrit the grammarians accepted and carried even farther than did contemporary vernaculars the process of the removal of irregularities and the disuse of variant forms, but they sanctioned hardly any new formations, producing a form of expression well ordered and purified, worthy of the name Sanskrit which the Rdmayana first accords to it. The importance of the part played by religion in preserving accuracy of speech is shown by the existence of a special form of sacrifice, the SarasvatI, which was destined to expiate errors of speech during the sacrifice, and in the Mahabhasya of Patanjali (150 B.C.) it is recorded that there were at one time seers of great knowledge who in their ordinary speech were guilty of using the inaccurate yar vd nas tar vd nah for yad vd nas tad vd nah, but who, while sacrificing, were scrupulously exact.
The influence of the grammarians, whose results were summed up in Panini's Astddhydyi, probably in the fourth century B.C., is seen in the rigid scheme of euphonic combination of the words within the sentence or line of verse. This is clearly artificial, converting a natural speech tendency into something impossibly rigid, and, as applied to the text of the Rgveda, often ruining the metrical effect. Similar rigidity is seen in the process which sub- stitutes in many cases y and v for the iy and uv of the earlier speech. Dialectic influence may be traced in the recognition of / in many words in lieu of r, and a certain distinction between the dialect which underlies the Rgveda and- that of Panini is revealed by the absolute ignoring by the latter of the substitution of / and Ih for d and dk. x Otherwise the chief mark of progress is the gro'wth of the tendency to cerebralization, possibly under Dravidian influence.
In morphology there was elimination of double forms ; a as a variant for ena in the instrumental singular of a stems disappeared,
1 Cf. Luders, Ftstschttfl Watkernagil, pp 294 ff.
