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A Comprehensive and Critical dictionary of Prākrit Languages (Introduction)
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hiting in and yā, wrinkosen as t
nature, affect a large number of words. In all cases of this type the meaning and the usage remain the same. To give recognition to all such variants as independent entries will lead to endless repetition without any advantage. To add to this undesirable situation, we find that a word assumes different shapes in the same language and thus increases the number of entries. Most of such changes are optional and both alternatives occur in literature. The failure on the part of the modern editors to distinguish between real phonological difference and orthographical variation has led to a situation which is intolerable and the lexicographer has to make a determined effort to reduce the number of entries so produced. This situation is similar to one, caused by the spelling variations, found in Old and Middle English. The treatment which is given to these spelling variations in the lexicons of these languages is adopted for the Prākrit words as well. In this dictionary, all such variations which occur in the same language or even a number of languages are given as variant forms at one place under the word chosen as the lemma. Thus writing of vowels like a and à as ya and yā, writing a ta in place of the consonants which are lost, writing i and u for the short values of e and o, and many others will be treated as spelling variants of a given vocable. This will help reduce the entries to a considerable extent and help the lexicographer to quote passages at one place even when they contain the given word in different phonetic shapes. 4. Parts of Speech
The grammatical status of the words in the dictionary will be indicated by using the theory of the parts of speech. The system of Sanskrit which classifies all the words (Padas) into two classes, nouns (called subanta) and verbs (called tiñanta) and includes the other words among nouns by the device of adding terminations and then dropping them, is not much useful and cannot be followed for the Prākrit languages. Nor is it economical because the classification of the subantas will have to be divided further into many subdivisions to explain their meaning and use in the language. The European grammatical tradition began with Aristotle by setting up three classes called nouns, verbs, and a third heterogenous group called syndesmoi (= connectors) which included the article, pronouns, conjunctions and possibly prepositions as well. Thrax codified for. Greek the eight parts of speech as nouns, verbs, participles, article, pronouns, prepositions, adverbs and conjunctions. As Latin lacked an article. Priscian dropped it in his classification and added interjections in its place. These eight parts of speech thus became current upto the modern times and were used for all types of languages. In spite of the fact that this theory is based on both formal and