The Secret Of The Veda Aurobindo - HolyBooks.com

54 The Secret of the Veda
a sense thus restored illumines always the context wherever it is
applied and on the other hand that a sense demanded always by
the context is precisely that to which we are led by the history
of the word. This is a sufficient basis for a moral, if not for an
absolute certainty.
Secondly, one remarkable feature of language in its inception
is the enormous number of different meanings of which a single
word was capable and also the enormous number of words
which could be used to represent a single idea. Afterwards this
tropical luxuriance came to be cut down. The intellect intervened
with its growing need of precision, its growing sense of economy.
The bearing capacity of words progressively diminished; and it
became less and less tolerable to be burdened with a superfluous
number of words for the same idea, a redundant variety of
ideas for the same word. A considerable, though not too rigid
economy in these respects, modified by a demand for a temperate
richness of variation, became the final law of language. But the
Sanskrit tongue never quite reached the final stages of this development;
it dissolved too early into the Prakrit dialects. Even in
its latest and most literary form it is lavish of varieties of meanings
for the same word; it overflows with a redundant wealth
of synonyms. Hence its extraordinary capacity for rhetorical
devices which in any other language would be difficult, forced
and hopelessly artificial, and especially for the figure of double
sense, of ´sles.a.
The Vedic Sanskrit represents a still earlier stratum in the
development of language. Even in its outward features it is less
fixed than any classical tongue; it abounds in a variety of forms
and inflexions; it is fluid and vague, yet richly subtle in its use
of cases and tenses. And on its psychological side it has not
yet crystallised, is not entirely hardened into the rigid forms
of intellectual precision. The word for the Vedic Rishi is still
a living thing, a thing of power, creative, formative. It is not
yet a conventional symbol for an idea, but itself the parent and
former of ideas. It carries within it the memory of its roots, is
still conscient of its own history.
The Rishis’ use of language was governed by this ancient