पृष्ठम्:The Sanskrit Language (T.Burrow).djvu/६२

OUTLINES OF THE HISTORY OF SANSKRIT 55 used. In particular the Ganapatha contains numerous terms which are found nowhere else, and since this text was handed down without meanings for a long time, it is often impossible now to discover the meaning of such words. The old distinction in meaning between the three past tenses (Imperfect, Aorist, Perfect) was not normally observed. The Aorist, though culti- vated by the learned, seems to have gone out of common use, 1 The middle perfect participles in - ana are entirely disused, and the active participles in -vas appear only rarely. The innovations of the later classical Sanskrit affect mainly syntax and vocabulary. The most striking syntactical develop- ment is the increasing tendency to use compound words and the increasing length and complexity of the compounds used. In the earliest Sanskrit the use of compounds is not noticeably more predominant than in the Greek of Homer. In the lan- guage of Panini’s day there were still strict rules and limitations in the formation of compound words, as is clearly evident from his own statements and examples. In the later language they are formed without restriction (e.g. any adjective' may be so construed With any noun, as opposed to the original arrange- ment by which this could only be done when the term had a special significance, krsnasarpa- ' cobra J , etc.), and not infre- quently in direct contradiction to Panini's rules (e.g. jagat- kartar - ' world-creator ' against P. 2. 2. 15-16). But the main thing is that there ceases to be any limitation to the number of members a compound may contain, since compound words treated as units may be compounded with further words, and by a process of accumulation long complexes are built up in which the syntactical relation of the members is expressed without recourse to inflection. This practice is not only at vari- ance with the earlier usage and with Indo-European usage in general, but is also obviously incompatible with any form of popular speech which can have prevailed in India during the period This linguistic development is a purely literary de- velopment, and it is a sign of the growing artificiality of the Sanskrit language as the difference between it and the ver- nacular Middle Indo-Aryan grew wider. 1 The hero of the drama Padmaprabhrtaka (c. second or third cent, a.d,) asks a grammarian who speaks pedantically to use ordinary Sanskrit {vydvahdrikd bhd$a). The pedantry which is illustrated consists in the liberal use of aorists and desideratives.