23 SANSKRIT, PRAKRIT, AND APABHRANCA
Sutras, and the grammarians carried it to excess ; their works furnish abundant instances of insistence on using cases in a preg- nant sense and in affecting compounds ; gerunds are frequent in the ritual texts. It has been suggested that the love for partici- pial forms is partly explained by Dravidian influence ; l the periphrastic future in both Sanskrit and Dravidian uses the auxiliary verb only in the first and second persons ; the type krtavan has a parallel in geydavan ; the rule of the order of words in which the governed word precedes and the verb is placed at the end of the sentence is Dravidian. Unhappily, the arguments are inconclusive ; 2 the omission of the auxiliary in the third person is natural, for in that person in any sentence whatever it is commonly omitted as easily understood ; the order of words in Sanskrit has parallels in many other languages than Dravidian and rests on genera] rules of thought.
Beside the correct or comparatively correct Sanskrit of the poetic literature we find, especially in technical and non-Brah- manical works, abundant evidence of a popular Sanskrit or mixed Sanskrit in various forms. Generically it can be regarded as the result of men who were not wont to use Sanskrit trying to write in that language, but there are different aspects. Thus the early Buddhist writers who decided to adapt to the more learned language the Buddhist traditions probably current in Ardhama- gadhi were hampered by the desire not to depart unduly in verse at least from their models, a fact which explains the peculiar forms found especially in Gathas, but also in prose in such a text as the Mahavastu? Traces of this influence persist even in much more polished Buddhist writers such as Acvaghosa, and much of it may be seen in the Divyavadatia, though that work
1 Konow, LSI. iv. 2 79rT. ; Grieison, BSOS. I. iu. Ji; Carnoy, JAOS. xxxix. 1 1 7 ff . ; Chatlerji, i. I74ff.
2 Cf. R. Swaminatha Aiyar, POCP. 1919, i, pp. Ixxi ff., who legitimately points out that the evidence of Dravidian is very late in date, and these languages probably bor- rowed from Aryan. K. G. J>ankar (JRAS. 1924, pp. 664 ff.) points out that the Tot-kappiyam, the oldest Tamil work, must be after 400 a. D. as it refers to the Poruladhikaramsutra, horary astrology, and that the Moriyas of the Sangam are the Mauryas of the Konkana, who date after 494 A. d,
8 Cf. Senart, i, pp. iv, xrii ff. ; Wackernagel, Altind. Gramm., i, p. xxxix. Contrast F. W. Thomas, JRAS. 1904, p. 469, who regards the mixed Sanskrit as representing middle-class speech. Poussin (Indo-turoplcns t p. 305) stresses convention as stereo- typing usage.
