Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Wilson Philological Lectures on Sanskrit and the Derived Languages Delivered in 1877
I was appointed Wilson Philological Lecturer in 1877 and was thus the first lecturer under the Endowment. My subject was the Sanskrit and the Prakrit Languages derived from it. I understood the word Prakrit in a comprehensive sense, so as to include modern Vernaculars of Northern India also; and thus delivered a course of seven lectures on Sanskrit in its several forms, the Pali and the Dialects of the period, the Prakrits and the Apabhrams'a, Phonology of the Vernaculars, Remnants of the older Grammatical Forms in the Vernaculars, New Grammatical Formations to supply the place of the forms that had disappeared and General Questions as to the relation between these several languages. The method I followed is strictly historical, tracing the modern vernaculars from the original Sanskrit through all the different stages of development of which we have evidence and assigning the different transformations to their causes, natural or physical, racial, and historical. These lectures, with the exception of the fifth and the sixth, were thoroughly revised afterwards and the first two and the seventh were published in Vol. XVI of the Journal, B. B. R. A. S., between the years 1883 and 1885; while the third and the fourth were published between 1887 and 1889. The other two lectures remained in manuscript for a long time, until I finished in 1911 my book on "Vaisnavism, Saivism etc." which was written for the series of Encyclopedia of Indo-Aryan Research, which is being published at Strassburg by Karl J. Trubner. These have now been revised and I publish them for the first time along with a reprint of the other five lectures in the present volume. The delay in the publication has been due to my having had to attend to more urgent work, such as the preparation of a translation of the Vayu Purana for the "Sacred Books of the East," which had afterwards to be given up, the preparation of my Early History of the Dekkan and the search for Sanskrit Manuscripts and writing my several reports on them.
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