124 
LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE OF 
India, which we place at highest 500 years after Christ; 
at that time however the Sanskrit had been at least 8d0 
years a dead language in India. Against this idea, that 
they spoke Prakrit, pleads strongly the fact that we do not 
find a single Prakrit word in the Polynesian languages, 
that none of the assimilations, contractions and elisions 
which characterise the Prakrit appear in the Indian words 
of the Kawi; but it is this very fact which points the way 
to an explanation of the origin of the Kawi. 
In the Sanskrit words on Java and Bali we find corrup¬ 
tions, which have not originated in an Indian mode. To 
this class belong the contraction of wa to o, ya to e , the 
indistinct pronunciat'on, and the permutation thence arising, 
of u and o , o£i and e; further the permutation of ra and re 
(fe&rrdt, formerly recognized by me as ri-vocali$) which 
however like the preceding corruption never appears in 
good Balinese manuscripts. To this class belong also the 
corruption of the prefix pro, into par and per; the omission 
of the initial a in Sanskrit words, for example nugraha for 
anugraha 9 which they interchange with the non-significant 
initial letter a of Javanese verbs. The pronunciation of 
Anusuara as ng, ex. gr. in ong, should not be ascribed to a 
corruption ; this pronunciation appears to stand nearest to 
the unsettled sound of the Indian letters. The change of 
the Indian wtob in Bgasa , BalmiJci , Baruna is to he consid 
ered less as a corruption than as an accommodation of the 
Sanskrit idiom for the preservation of the vocalic pronuncia¬ 
tion. We thus believe that the few changes in Sanskrit words 
have had their origin in Java, and that not a single Prakrit 
word has been introduced into the lan-guage of that island. 
Thus the Hindu immigrants into Java, though they cer¬ 
tainly spoke the Prakrit, as we must presume if w r e consi¬ 
der the time of their arrival, appear to have abandoned 
that language at once and adopted the dialect of the country. 
The reason for this must be sought in the circumstance of 
the Hindus arriving but in small numbers and finding a large 
population of natives ; further, in their being partly Budhists, 
the adherents of which creed always adopted the man¬ 
ners and language of the nation to be converted, in the differ¬ 
ent countries into which they came. By the Budhists 
the devotees of Brarna were likewise compelled to yield with 
regard to language, in order not to irritate the people whom 
they wished to subject to their own worship and institutions, 
and to give thereby full play to the Budhists. Thus Bud- 
