पृष्ठम्:The Sanskrit Language (T.Burrow).djvu/३९२

LOANWORDS IN SANSKRIT 386 Panini, Patanjali, Mahabharata, Srautasutra, etc. The ma- jority appear also in Pali, which is important for dating since these canonical texts take us back to a period from 500- 300 b.c, The number that occur first only in later Sanskrit literature is again comparatively small. It is clear that as far as Sanskrit is concerned the active period of borrowing from Dravidian was well over before the Christian era. In Prakrit there are some new borrowings from Dravidian, but they are a good deal less numerous than those recorded above for the early Sanskrit period. They form only a small percentage of the new vocabulary of Prakrit. The common vocabulary of Modern Indo-Aryan has further new elements as opposed to Prakrit, but it is only rarely that any of these can be shown to be Dravidian. It is evident from this survey that the main influence of Dravidian on Indo-Aryan was concentrated at a particular historical period, namely between the late Vedic period and the formation of the classical language. This is significant from the point of view of the locality where the influence took place. It is not possible that at this period such influence could have been exercised by the Dravidian languages of the South. There were no intensive contacts with South India before the Maury a period by which time the majority of these words had already been adopted by Indo-Aryan. If the influence took place in the North in the central Gangetic plain and the classical Madhya- desa the assumption that the pre-Aryan population of this area contained a considerable element of Dravidian speakers would best account for the Dravidian words in Sanskrit. The Dravidian languages Kurukh and Malto are preserved even now in Northern India, and may be regarded as islands surviving from a once extensive Dravidian territory. The Dravidian words in the Rgveda attest the presence of Dravidian in North- Western India at that period. Brahui in Baluchis tan. remains as the modern representative of north-western Dravidian. It follows that the problem of Dravidian loairwords in San- skrit is somewhat different from what is usually met with in loanword studies, since the particular dialects or languages from which the borrowings took place have vanished leaving no record behind, and the major Dravidian languages of the South, with which mainly the comparisons must be made, are separated by great distances geographically and by anything up to a