पृष्ठम्:The Sanskrit Language (T.Burrow).djvu/६३

56 OUTLINES OF THE HISTORY OF SANSKRIT Another syntactical development affects the verb, but this is based on popular usage. Of the past tenses the aorist, with the amalgamation of some imperfect forms, survived in Early Middle Indo- Aryan, but by the time of the later Prakrit all traces of the old preterites have disappeared. Their place was taken by passive constructions with the past participle passive, and it is from this usage that the preterites of modem Indo- Aryan derive. The tendency is also reflected in Sanskrit litera- ture, and the passive construction becomes gradually more predominant. It had obviously the advantage of simplicity, since the complicated verbal inflection of Sanskrit could be dispensed with, and in works of deliberately simple style like the Hitopadesa it is evidently chosen for this purpose. For active use the participle in - tavant is adapted to serve as an alternative to the past tense : krtavdn ' he did The nominal phrase in which the meaning is expressed by the juxtaposition of subject and predicate, without any verb becomes increasingly popular. This is particularly so in the philosophic literature, and since that language also favours long compounds, we may find long passages of exposition in which the only grammar consists of a few case inflections of abstract nouns. The vocabulary of Sanskrit was on the whole remarkably stable. Nevertheless it is possible to collect from the later literature a considerable body of words wdiich do not appear in the earlier period. In some cases it may be an accident that they are not recorded earlier, but even making this allowance, there must remain a fair number of new words. Increases in vocabulary derive from the following sources : (i) They could be created, wdien required, on the basis of existing Sanskrit roots, prefixes and suffixes, and by the forma- tion of new compounds with special senses. {2) In the course of time some Prakrit w r ords were adopted into Sanskrit, though proportionally the number is never very large. No certain examples of this kind appear in the Vedic language, but they begin to appear in small numbers in the Epic and classical period. Words of this type are bhatta-, bhaitdra - bhattaraka - ' master, lord ' (Skt. bhariar -), nata - 1 actor ' (Skh nft- * to dance ') and dohada-, dohala- 4 morbid desire of a pregnant woman 1 which occur (more commonly) beside the regular Sanskrit daurhrda Skt. udu- 4 star ' derives from a Prakrit uduvai - * moon 1 misinterpreted as meaning 4 lord of