________________
started being used for nominal stems, the virtual merging of the Nominative and the Accusative, Instrumental and Locative, and Ablative and Genitive case, with the result that postpositions had to be used profusely to indicate different cases.
And in their lexical content there was a flood of new vocables, borrowed from some unknown source, not found in the earlier
t stage.10 Such a development is indeed just natural in the evolution of a language. And these linguistic peculiarities could not be uniform over a vast area, where Apabhramśa or the later development of Prakrit speech, was spoken. This created an illusion of the existence of several Apabhraíśas-which is voiced by rhetoricians like 2 and hang, poets like 142, and Eastern grammarians like 71957.
But the fact that Acārya Hemacadra, whose treatment of the linguistic form of Apabhramba is most exhaustive, and who had, presumably, seen all earlier Apabhramśa compositions and a number of Prakrit grammais, considers Apabhramsa as one single language, with distinct features of its own, definitely rules out the existence of several provincial Apabhram śas. This view is supported by eminent poets and rhetoricians like thatet, 175, apa and others. That the provenance of Apabhramśa has been, mainly, Western India, is also a very significant circumstance in this context.
It is true that grammarians like 71734 do mention several varieties of Apabhrama by name but they have either generally defined them as an admixture of languages like Mahārā stri and Sauraseni, or they have been unable to give more than one or two sütras to characterize them. It is probably their desire to show off their grammatical erudition that has induced them to indulge in such an untenable classification.
Similarly earlier Western scholars like Pischel and Grierson and following them, Dr. Sunitikumar Chatterjee, subscribe to the hypothesis of multiple Apabhraíśas. According to Grierson, there were several Apabhramśas like Saurasena Apabhramsa from which (according to him) Gujarati and Marwadi evolved, Maharastra 10. Cf. Bhayani, Ibid., p. 27
Jain Education International
For Private & Personal Use Only
www.jainelibrary.org
