158 Note on the Taxila Inseription. [No. 2, 
concerned, I may with perfect safety use. the more positive wholly 
All the words of common life such as father, mother, brother, sister, 
husband and wife are identically the same in Sanskrita and the 
Bactro-Pali. The terms for superior, king, governor, master, servant, 
town, country, mountain and river, in the latter are all taken 
from the former; and the adjectives, pronouns and verbs, though 
occasionally altered and rounded by the attrition of use or the laws 
of phonetic decay, still retain enough of their pristine form to indicate 
most unmistakably thei affiliation to the Sanskrita. Mr. EB. C. 
Bayley, in his remarks on my note on the Rawal Pindi inscription, has 
taken exception to the word A/ahi Saehya which I assumed to be de- 
rived from the Sanskrita Mahé Sachiva “the great minister,’ and to 
two other words. But, admitting for the sake of argument, that they 
are unSanskritic, the fact will amount to this that there are three 
foreign nouns in a Sanskritic composition, which can no more affect 
its character than the scores of Bengah or the thousands of Latin 
in the English, affect its Teutonie origm. The same may be said 
of proper names, a great many of which could not but be foreign in 
a record put up by foreigners in India. The grammar is unquestion- 
ably Sanskritie, and that being the blood and soul of the language, it 
is but reasonable and fair that, in deeyphering records in that lan- 
guage, half effaced on mouldering monuments, and written in characters 
whose powers are not yet fully known, and several of which may be 
mistaken for half a dozen different letters, the enquirer should seek 
in the Sanskrita for a key. 
Tt isno doubt remarkable that the language of the Bactrian inscrip- 
tions, put up by conquerors in a foreign land, should retain the purity 
of the native dialect, and be altogether free from the admixture of 
vocables imported from the speech of the dominant race. Itis, indeed, 
but natural to suppose that those who introduced their alphabet 
amongst their subject nation should likewise introduce their lan- 
guage ; and the contrary is a matter of surprise. But the difficulty 
vanishes when it is borne in mind that the inscriptions under notice 
were monumental records,and care was therefore taken to compose them 
in the purest of vernaculars, and that the Bactrians at the time had 
not had sufficient opportunity to infuse their language into the current 
speech of the country. 
Mr. Bayley is of opinion “that a foreign element was strong in 
the trans-Jhelum districts” between the 3rd century before,and the 2nd 
