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As Bhayani demonstrated in one of his later publications, it is possible to utilize stray surviving linguistic and metrical elements to get some sense of what the earliest form of Apabhramsa may have looked like around the sixth century CE, even if the earliest literary works composed in that dialect (or cluster of dialects) are not available. (2) Students of what can be styled "Middle Prakrit" should therefore be on the alert for proto-Apabhram śa (or -Late Prakrit) forms which presage a more developed usage at a later stage of Indo-Aryan linguistic evolution. (3)
Haribhadra's Pañcāśakaprakaraṇa, a work consisting of ninteen chapters, each of which (with one or two exceptions) consists of fifty verses in ārya metre describing Śvetambara Jain ritual and practice, has been dated to the early sixth century CE. (4) In the course of a study of the thirteenth chapter of that work which deals with purity in the context of alms-seeking by ascetics, my attention was drawn to the following verse, specifically Pañcāśakaprakarana 13.41:
na khalu pariņāmamettam padāṇakāle asakkiyārahiyam gihino tanayam tu jaim dūsai āṇāe paḍibaddham. (5)
This can be translated: "The mere resolve (to give) on the part of the householder which is devoid of bad action at the time of giving does not render faulty the ascetic who is fixed in the command (of scripture)."
The overall context of this verse will be discussed elsewhere. (6) What is linguistically noteworthy is the form taṇayam. Abhayadeva Sūri glosses this as satkam which provides a satisfactory sense without grammatical identification. On inspection, taṇayam would appear here to agree with pariņāmamettam and amplify the genitive gihino, signifying in terms of function something corresponding to "relating to" or "on the part of".
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