Page Text
________________
FOREWORD
I would like to record here a similar intriguing suffixing of 7 exclusively to names of female ancestors in the Vedic ritual of pitr-tarpaņa, while offering libations of water to the departed names of three generations. For instance, in the case of male ancestors the word is added to the name with the necessary declensional case-suffix; e.g. 374 nr fut: fect Fault 74744ft etc. But in the case of female ancestors, it is usual to add g1; e.g. 374961: HTĘ: FAUT 746144f4.
I must confess that I have not been able to understand the meaning, significance or purpose of this T nor to explain its philological roots. In fact, there is also an alternative practice, which is in vogue in some families where this intriguing al is substituted by simple it after the female names.
My own family belongs to this latter tradition. Perhaps, it may be possible to correlate this 1 after female names in ritualistic religious usage in the south with the after female names in these secular usages in Gujarat. In any case, the line of explanation suggested above linking with fat cannot hold good in the case of 7. It will also be necessary to examine whether this after female names was confined only to the Jain community or had a wider range of application.
There is one more possibility, which may not be ruled out altogether, though it may be a remote possibility. The suffixed to female names in these inscriptions could as well be just another of the many abbreviations freely adopted in these inscriptions as an expedient for saving space, like for भार्या, पु for पुत्र, का for कारित, प्र or प्रति for प्रतिष्ठित and so on. In fact, these inscriptions bristle with such abbreviations, specially improvised for economising space. I have dwelt upon these at some length in a subsequent section of this Introduction.
Though these pedastal inscriptions are all extremely brief, comprising one single sentence and though they are all set on an almost rigid stereotyped pattern, they shed some invaluable light on the following points of philological or linguistic interest :
1. The use of Sanskrit in records of enduring value. 2. The use and standardisation of abbreviations in Sanskrit. 3. Adaptation of the Sanskrit language to changing requirements and
situations; peculiar devices and methods improvised in these
inscriptions for overcoming the limitations of space. 4. The vernacularisation of some typical Sanskrit words, leading
to new patterns of a words and hybrid formations and the
| SR No. | 007173 |
| Book Title | Patan Jain Dhatu Pratima Lekh Sangraha |
| Original Sutra Author | N/A |
| Author | Lakshmanbhai H Bhojak |
| Publisher | B L Institute of Indology |
| Publication Year | 2002 |
| Total Pages | 360 |
| Language | Hindi, Sanskrit |
| Classification | Book_Devnagari |
| File Size | 25 MB |