26 SANSKRIT, PRAKRIT, AND APABHRANQA
As the passage of time made Sanskrit more and more a language of culture, it reveals in increasing measure a lack of delicate sensi- bility to idiomatic use of words, such as is engendered by usage in a living speech more closely in touch with ordinary life. The defect, however, is sometimes exaggerated, for it must not be forgotten that poets of all times are apt, through considerations of metre or desire for effect, 1 to adopt unusual senses of words and to strain meanings ; Pindar and Propertius illustrate a tendency which is found more or less markedly throughout classical litera- ture, while the Alexandrian Lykophron is guilty of as distinct linguistic monstrosities as any Indian poet. The tendency in their case was accentuated by the growing love for paronomasias, and the tendency to study poetic dictionaries which gave lists of synonyms, ignoring the fact that in reality two terms are practi- cally never really coextensive in sense. The grammatical know- ledge of the poets also led them into inventing terms or using terms in senses etymologically unexceptionable but not sanc- tioned by usage.
4. The Prakrits
The most widely accepted etymology of Prakrit current in India treats the name as denoting derivative, the prime source {prakrti) being Sanskrit. Another view reverses the position ; Prakrit is what comes at once from nature, what all people without special instruction can easily understand and use. 2 It is impossible to decide what was the process which led to the use of the term ; perhaps speeches other than Sanskrit received the name from being the common or vulgar speech, the language of the humble man as opposed to him of education who could talk the pure language. In the grammarians and writers on poetics the term more especially denotes a number of distinctly artificial literary dialects, which as they stand were certainly not vernaculars ; but it is customary to use the term to apply to Indian vernaculars prior to the period when the modern vernaculars became fixed. An even wider sense is given by Sir George Grierson, who classifies Prakrits in three great stages :
1 Catnllus' curious compounds in the A His illustrate this theme. 1 Pischel, Grammatik der Prakrit -Sprachcn (1900), §§ 1, 16.
