16 SANSKRIT, PRAKRIT, AND APABHRAN^A
the sixth century onwards, often mixed with Dravidian phrases, attesting the tendency of Sanskrit to become a Koine, 'and Sanskrit left a deep impression even on the virile Dravidian languages. Ceylon fell under its influence, and Sinhalese shows marked traces of its operation on it. It reached the Sunda Islands, Borneo, the Philippines, and in Java produced a remark- able development in the shape of the Kavi speech and literature. Adventurers of high rank founded kingdoms in Further India, where Indian names are already recorded by the geographer Ttolemy in the second century A. D. The Sanskrit inscriptions of Campa begin perhaps in that century, those of Cambodia betore a. D. 6oo, and they bear testimony to the energetic study of Sanskrit grammar and literature. Of greater importance still was the passage of Sanskrit texts to Central Asia and their influence on China, Tibet, and Japan.
It is characteristic of the status of Sanskrit as the speech of men of education thatjn one sphere of use it only slowly came to be widely employed. Coins were meant for humble practical uses, and even Western Ksatrapas, like Rudradaman, who used Sanskrit for their inscriptions, were contented with Prakrit for coin legends ; but even in this sphere Sanskrit gradually prevailed. 1
The results which we have attained are in accord with the evidence afforded by Greek renderings of Indian terms. 2 These are neither wholly based on Sanskrit forms nor on Prakrit. Derived doubtless from the speech now of the upper, now of the lower classes, they remind us of the salient fact that at any given moment in India there were in active use several forms of speech varying according to the class of society. The denial of the vernacular character of Sanskrit 3 rests largely on a failure to realize the true point at issue, on a confusion between the earlier period when Sanskrit was far more close to the speech of the lower classes and later times, or on the fallacious view that the only speech which deserves the style of a vernacular must be
1 Bloch, Mllanges Lhii, p, 16.
2 L£vi, BSL. viii, pp. vui, *, xvii j Franke, ZDMG. xlvii. 596 ft. ; Bloch, Mllangts Lhii, pp. 1 ff.
' Grierson, JRAS. 1904, p. 481. On this view standard English would not be a vernacular.
