Amrita Collected Papers by A M Ghatage

SR No.: 006968
Original Sutra Author: N/A
Author: Jitendra B Shah
Publisher: Kasturbhai Lalbhai Smarak Nidhi Ahmedabad
Total Pages: 530
Language: English
Classification: Book_English
File Size: 10 MB

Page 518

A Comprehensive and Critical dictionary of Prākrit Languages (Introduction)
509
VI. ABBREVIATIONS
Various types of abbreviations have to be used in a comprehensive dictionary in order to make the work as compact as possible. These abbreviations fall into a number of groups : (i) abbreviations of grammatical terms and terms of general nature used in textual and literary criticism. These have been mostly standardised and they will be easily known. (ii) There are symbols which will be used to make clear some aspects of linguistics which, otherwise, will take a lot of space if explained in so many words. (iii) Then the names of various languages and dialects will have to be indicated by abbreviations and also the names of ancient writers and modern scholars will be abbreviated when reference is made to them. There will be abbreviations of the names of the series of publications and other bibliographical information to be given. Above all, a dictionary which is giving quotations from various books on an extensive scale must make use of abbreviations of the names of books which form the corpus of the dictionary. As these names of books are expected to occur thousands of times, it is essential to make the abbreviations self-explanatory or at least easily recallable, even at the cost of making them a little longer, when once they have been noted.
Abbreviations which occur in books which are to be read continuously and which deal with a specific subject or topic will not be found suitable in a dictionary which is to be constantly referred to and in which the context extends over one small entry and gives no help in guessing the source. The practice followed in the lexicons of the classical languages of Europe viz. to use the name of the author first and then indicate his work, will have to be reversed in the case of the classical languages of India. The primary reference will be to the book and only in case of homophonous titles of books author's name will be given to distinguish between them. In the Indian literature as a whole, the names of books are found to be longer than those of the authors and homophony is prevalent in both the types of names. The method used is to combine the abbreviated name of the book, followed by the abbreviated name of the author in brackets. As the number of books to be referred to goes on increasing, the abbreviations also become longer to avoid overlap.
The self-explanatory nature of the abbreviations of books will depend upon the system used in forming them. The syllabic writing used in Indian literature makes it necessary to abbreviate the names to the first syllable by using the principle of acronomy. It may also require us to split the name into its constituent elements and use this principle for each one of its parts and indicate the division by using the capital letter for the first syllable of each such part. Most of the names will consist of two or three such units and very