many hypotheses which might be tenable if we had merely the languages without a contemporary history of the times when they arose.”[1] It is precisely in this respect that the Indian languages are wanting. In early Indian literature we have Sanskrit and the Prakrits only, and though these latter by exhibiting certain phonetic changes help us very much in tracing the origin of modern words, yet in the inflectional department, so to speak, they afford very little real assistance, because they remain still purely synthetical. Moreover, those Prakrits which contain the greatest amount of literature lie under the same suspicion as Sanskrit, namely, that they do not represent the spoken language of their day. It seems, unhappily, to have been the fate of every Indian language, that directly men began to write in it, they ceased to be natural, and adopted a literary style which was handed down from one generation of writers to another, almost, if not entirely, unchanged. Thus not only has the Sanskrit remained fixed and unaltered through all the ages, but the Buddhists have fossilized one dialect of Prakrit, and the Jains another; so that whatever may be the date of any works either in Sanskrit or the Prakrits which have been, or may hereafter be, discovered, we cannot accept even the most recent of them as exhibiting the real contemporary condition of any vernacular. In point of development, we do not get lower down than about the first century of our era; for even if we get a Jain book written in the fifth or sixth century, we shall find it composed in the language of the first or second, just as a Sanskrit work written yesterday is composed in a form of speech which has not been current for twenty-seven centuries. The curtain falls on Indian languages, then, about the first century, and does not rise again till the tenth; and when it rises, the dawn
- ↑ Sir G. C. Lewis, "Essay on the Romance Languages," p. 9. This clever little work gives an admirably condensed and lucid epitome of the whole question of the Romance languages.
