1838.] rock ofGirnar in Gujerat, and Dhauli in Cuttack. 281 



Tjgft palli, a village; as we should nowadays distinguish gaonw a W, villa- 

 ger, boorish, from urdd the language of the court. There is no trace of 

 genuine Prdkrit in either of the dialects, and we may therefore agree 

 with Prof. Lassen that the patois of the dramas was not used until 

 three or four centuries later. The grammarians who subsequently framed 

 the rules of this corrupted idiom cease to mention Pah at all ; — a proof 

 that it had already been banished the country along with the Buddhist 

 religion ; while the Magadhi by them set down as nearly the lowest 

 of jargons is evidently quite different from the inferior language of the 

 pillars, and the Cuttack inscriptions. 



Hereafter we may be able to classify the various written vernacular 

 languages of India in chronological order, as regular as the modifica- 

 tions of the alphabet in the accompanying plate, and thus venture to 

 approximate the date of many an uncertain author : — but the result as 

 regards the Sanskrit itself is already manifest ; — the further back we go, 

 the nearer we approach to this parent tongue. And yet in the sixth 

 century before Christ we are far, very far, removed from its pristine 

 purity, in what we suppose to be the spoken dialect of the day; while 

 on the other hand we have proof that the grammatical structure of this 

 classical language itself has not in the slightest degree changed since the 

 time of Alexander the Great. 



That there were many provincial dialects prevalent, even in the time 

 of Buddha has been already proved from the books of his followers. I 

 cannot however close my present hasty notice better than by inserting 

 the very words extracted from the Tibetan authorities by my friend 

 M. Csoma de Koros at my request, since in the discussions which may 

 ensue upon this prolific theme it will be always more satisfactory to re- 

 fer to the author's own words than to a translation. Mr. Csoma 

 writes : — 



" I beg leave to lay before you a passage from the Index or Intro- 

 duction to the one hundred volumes of the Kah-gyur (as quoted there 

 from the fourth abridged commentary on the Kdla chakra Tantra) 

 showing that the doctrine of Shakya, after his death, was compiled in 

 different languages in different parts of India, and in some other foreign 

 countries. The quotation, in Tibetan is thus: 



