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was a well-known literary language of Western India, showing hardly any noticable dialectal variations.15
It is possible that western scholars have been misled by Hemacandra's concluding sutra hallaa (VIII-4-446), and a few Saurasenisms in Hemacandra's Apabhramsa.16
As Shri Madhusudan Modi points out Apabhramśa happened to develop two varieties or streams towards the close of the later MIA and the beginning of the NIA stage. One of it-the 34TEE (Sk 379372) form of language, was employed by the 'cāraņas' or bards in their bardic compositions. Srihara Vyas's FUTAESSA, Sālisūriś farza, portions of Lāvanyasamaya's famsara, and similar works in Gujarati, all the Dingala (fr) poems in Old Rajasthani, and wife of Vidyāpati are composed in this language. The language of HTM19$ also is 377E& though it resembles literary Apabhramśa more than the Bardic Avahatpha.
The other form of Apabhramba developed in course of time into Gujarāti, Rajasthani and Western Hindi languages. The simplification of Apabhramśa conjuncts, with compensatory lengthening of the preceding vowel, profuse use of postpositions to denote case-relationships, far-reaching developments in verbal forms, etc. led to the development of Gujarati. By a much similar process evolved Rajasthani and western Hindi too. As Shri Modi has aptly described, early Gujarati literature has derived so many of its literary forms, its prosodial structure and a significant literary
15. Cf. Bhayani, ‘Vägvyāpāra', p. 141. 16. In FHEATS, we occasionally come across stray illustrations
showing Saurasenisms, like the voicing of consonants (cf. sutras 377, 380), or optional preservation of in conjuncts, or a few solitary instances of assimilation of conjuncts. These divergences may be due to geographical reasons, but they are too few and exceptional to warrant existence of various fullfledged dialects. Cf. Bhayani, q13641412, pp. 142, 143.
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