_Vocabulary._--In the article INDO-ARYAN LANGUAGES it is explained that, allowing for phonetic development, the vocabulary of Sauraseni Prakrit was the same as that of Sanskrit, but that the farther we go from the Midland, the more examples we meet of a new class of words, the so-called _desyas_, descendants of the old Primary Prakrits spoken outside the Midland, and strange to Sanskrit. Maharastri Prakrit, the most independent of the Outer languages, was distinguished by the large proportion of these _desyas_ found in its vocabulary, and the same is consequently the case in Marathi. The Brahmins of the Maratha country have always had a great reputation for learning, and their efforts to create a literary language out of their vernacular took, as in other parts of India, the direction of borrowing _tatsamas_ from Sanskrit, to lend what they considered to be dignity to their sentences. But the richness of the language in _desya_ words has often rendered such borrowing unnecessary, and has saved Marathi, although the proportion of _tatsamas_ to _tadbhavas_[5] in the language is more than sufficiently high, from the fate of the Pandit-ridden literary Bengali, in which 80 to 90% of the vocabulary is pure Sanskrit. There is indeed a tradition of stylistic chastity in the Maratha country from the earliest times, and even Sanskrit writers contrasted the simple elegance of the Deccan (or _Vaidarbhi_) style with the flowery complexity of eastern India. The proportion of Persian and, through Persian, of Arabic words in the Marathi vocabulary is comparatively low, when compared with, say, Hindostani. The reason is, firstly, the predominance in the literary world of these learned Brahmins, and, secondly, the fact that the Maratha country was not conquered by the Mussulmans till a fairly late period, nor was it so thoroughly occupied by them as were Sind, the Punjab, and the Gangetic valley.