unreasonable contempt of the Humanists for the medieval Latin which after all was the organic development of the speech of Rome."
83. The psychology of the grammatical puzzle of the Old school is not inscrutable. I suppose it sprang from a desire to find a bad name for a dog that was to be hanged. It obviated the necessity of explicitly recognising the existence of two dialects and facing the problem as to which of the two dialects was best indicated as a suitable instrument of Modern Prose.
GRAMYA
84. Another much misunderstood and misinterpreted word is Gramya. It is a technical term of the grammar of the poetic dialect which is variously explained. The first grammarian Ketana did not define the term but the examples which he gave are all from the spoken Telugu of his day which, he thought, did not find recognition from the poets. According to him gramya bore the same relation to the poet’s Telugu as the Apabrahmsa of the Sanskrit grammarians bore to classical Sanskrit. Like Ketana all subsequent grammarians gave their examples of Gramya from spoken Telugu but later grammarians introduced confusion into the meaning of this technical term of Telugu grammar, by importing into it the meaning it carries in Sanskrit rhetoric, of ‘vulgar.’ Appakavi says in one place that gramya is the speech of the rustic classes. (Vide appakaviyamu, The edition of Messrs. V. Rama swami Sastrulu & Sons, page 37). The meaning of the term was further extended to ingrammaticisms. The Old school call polite Telugu of the present day gramya and the term is rendered by the English words “vulgar, slang, dialectal, ungrammatical.” Of the three meanings given by the grammarians to the word gramya only one, the first, applies to that portion of polite spoken Telugu which was not utilised by the early poets. The very term ‘polite’ excludes slang and vulgar. Slang
