English
The Edicts are undoubtedly in the language which was spoken and understood by the people in Asoka's time ; and the fact that the same Edicts are recorded in dialects slightly differing from each other, in the different parts of India, prove conclu- sively that the great emperor desired to publish his laws in the dialect which was spoken by the people in each separate portion of his extensive empire. The inscriptions shew that the spoken language of Northern India was essentially the same, from the Himalaya to the Vindhya mountains, and from the Indus to the Ganges. /There are slight variations how- ever, from which antiquarians have made out three varieties of the spoken tongue of the period. General Cunningham calls them the Punj&bi, or North-western dialect, the Ujfeni or middle dialect, and the MAgadhi or eastern dialect The Punjabi dialect is closer to Sanscrit than the others. It retains the r in such words as Priyadarsi, Srimana, &c. ; it retains the three sibilants of the Digitized by Google 26 BUDDHIST FERIOD. [BOOK IV. Sanscrit ; and it shews a nearer approach to Sanscrit forms. The Ujjeni dialect has its r as well as // while the Magadhi dialect is marked by the entire absence of r for which / has been substituted, Ldja for Rdja, Dasalat/uz for Dasaratha, &c. Considering then the slightly varying dialects as one spoken language, antiquarians have held that that language is Pali. Prinsep called the language to be " intermediate between Sanscrit and Pali." Professor Wilson made a careful and searching examination of four different versions of the Rock Edicts, and stated his opinion that " the language itself is a kind of Pali, offering for the greater portion of the words forms analogous to those which are modelled by the rules of the Pali grammar still in use. There are however many differences, some of which arise from a closer adherence to Sanscrit, others from possible local pecu- liarities, indicating a yet unsettled state of the language." Professor Lassen agrees with Dr. Wilson in main- taining that the language of Asoka's inscriptions is Pali, and he further maintains that the Pali is the eldest daughter of the Sanscrit, — the oldest spoken tongue in Northern India after Sanscrit had ceased to be a spoken tongue. Dr. Muir supports this view by a comparison of the language of the inscriptions with the language of the Buddhist scriptures taken to Ceylon in the 3rd century B. C, and proves that they are pretty much the same language, — Pali. In an " essai sur le Pali," Digitized by Google CHAP. II.] LANGUAGE AND ALPHABET. 27 written by Burnouf and Lassen, those learned authors maintain that Pali stands "on the first step of the ladder of departure from Sanskrit, and is the first of the series of dialects which break up that rich and fertile language."* This then is a sufficiently clear and definite fact which is invaluable to the historian of India. We know the spoken tongue of the Vedic Age, which has been preserved in the simplest and most beautiful hymns of the Rig Veda. We know the spoken tongue of the Epic Age which has been preserved in the prose Brihmanas and Aranyakas. After 1000 B. C. there was a growing divergence between the spoken and the written tongue. Learned Stitras were composed in the old grammatical Sanscrit, while the people spoke, and Gautama preached in the sixth century B. C, in a some- what simpler and more fluent language. What that language was, we know from the edicts of Asoka ; for the spoken tongue could not have changed very much from 477 B. C, when Gautama died, to 260 B. C, when Asoka reigned. The spoken language then of the third or Rationalistic Period was an early form of Pali, by whatever names (Magadhi, &c.) antiquarians may choose to call it And varieties of this language con- * Dr. Rajendra Lala Mitra supposes the corrupt Sanscrit of the Baddhist Githas to be intermediate in point of time between pure Sanscrit ind the Pali. It is probable however that this corrupt form of Sanscrit was used at the same time when Pali became a spoken tongue. Digitized by 28 BUDDHIST PERIOD. [BOOK IV. tinued to be the spoken tongue of Northern India during the fourth or Buddhist Period. In the fifth or Pauranik Period the Pili had been considerably altered and formed into the different Prakrit dialects which we find in the dramas of this period. The grammatical forms of the Prakrit depart more widely from the Sanscrit than those of the P&li, and his- torically too, we know that the spoken language of K&li- disa's heroines was later than the spoken tongue of Asoka. Before the Pauranik Period closed, another change had taken place ; and the Prakrits had been further modified into the Hindi, in Northern India by iooo A. D. It will thus be seen that the spoken tongue of Northern India has undergone considerable changes within the last four thousand years. In the Vedic Period it was the Sanscrit of the Rig Veda ; in the Epic Period it was the Sanscrit of the BriLhmanas ; * in the Ration- alistic and Buddhist Periods it was Pdli ; in the Pauranik Period it was the Prdkrits ; and since the rise of the Rajputs in the ioth century it has been the Hindi.f * Lassen, Bcnfey, Muir, and other scholars have proved that the old Sanscrit was once a spoken tongue. This self-evident proposition has sometimes been questioned on very insufficient grounds. f M. Senart states that the Vedic Sanscrit was down to the 3rd cen- tury B. C. the subject of some degree of culture ; that classic or modem Sanscrit was formed between the 3rd century B. C. and 1st century A. D. ; that the mixt Sanscrit of the Gathas was only a manner of writing the Prakrits ; and the PrSkrits were popular in their origin and were fixed in their later literary form between the 2nd and 4th centuries A. D. Digitized by Google CHAP. II.] LANGUAGE AND ALPHABET. 29 From the subject of the spoken language of India we turn to the subject of alphabet on which much has been written and many wild conjectures have been indulged in. The DevanAgari character, in which Sanscrit is now written, is of comparatively recent origin. The oldest Indian character known is that in which Asoka's inscriptions were recorded in the third century before Christ. It is necessary to mention that these inscrip. tions are recorded in two distinct characters— one reading from right to left, like the modern Arabic and Persian, and the other reading from left to right, like the modern Devandgari and the European characters. The former is confined to the Kapur da Giri inscription and to the coins of the Greek and Scythian princes of Ariana ■ and it has been called the Ariano-Pdli character. The latter is the common character of all other texts of Asoka's inscriptions, and has been called the Indo- P&li character. The Ariano-PAli character is not one of Indian origin, and was never used in India except in the ex- treme western frontier. Mr. Thomas rightly concludes that it has no claim to an indigenous origin in India, based, as it manifestly is, upon an alphabet cognate with the Phoenician. On the other hand the Indo-Pdli character was not only universally used in India, but can claim to be of indigenous Indian origin. As we have stated before, it Digitized 30 BUDDHIST PERIOD. [BOOK IV. reads from left to right, and it is formed exclusively of straight lines or portions of circles. Mr. Thomas has no hesitation in stating that it is an " independently devised and locally matured scheme of writing ; " and he insists pointedly to the Indian origin of the Indo- Pdli alphabet because it pleases many antiquarians still to conjecture that the Hindus borrowed their alphabet from the Greeks or Phoenicians. General Cunningham maintains with Mr. Thomas the Indian origin of the Indo-PAli character. His remarks on the subject of the origin of alphabets generally, and of the Indo-P&li alphabet in particular, are so thoughtful that we make no hesitation in making some extracts. " The first attempts of mankind at graphic represen- tation must have been confined to pictures or direct imitations of actual objects. This was the case with the Mexican paintings, which depicted only such material objects as could be seen by the eye. An improvement on direct pictorial representation was made by the ancient Egyptians in the substitution of a part for the whole, as of a human head for a man, a bird's head for a bird, &c. The system was still further extended by giving to certain pictures indirect values or powers symbolical of the objects represented. Thus a jackal was made the type of cunning, and an ape the type of rage. By a still further application of this abbreviated symbolism a pair of human arms with spear and shield Digitized by Google CHAP. II.] LANGUAGE AND ALPHABET. 3 1 denoted fighting, a pair of human legs meant walking, while a hoe was the type of digging, an eye of seeing, &c. But even with this poetical addition the means of expressing thoughts and ideas by pictorial representa- tions was still very limited.* * It seems certain there- fore that at a very early date the practice of pure picture writing must have been found so complicated and inconvenient that the necessity for a simpler mode of expressing their ideas was forced upon the Egyptian priesthood. The plan which they invented was highly ingenious. •••••••• u To the greater number of their pictorial symbols, the Egyptians assigned the phonetic values of the particular sounds or names, of which each symbol previously had been only a simple picture. Thus to a mouth, ru, they assigned the value r, and to a hand, tut, the value /.