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PREFACE (SECOND EDITION)
This booklet is intended to serve as a handy Manual for those students of Indian Universities who offer Ardhamāgadhi as their Classical language in the first and the second years of their college life. It may also prove useful to those who offer Ardhamāgadhi as a subsidiary language at their B. A. Examination, and who, for various reasons, have no time to study grammars of Prakrit languages written in Sanskrit-all indigenous grammars of Prakrit languages being written in that language. Besides I find that in none of these original grammars is Ardhamāgadhi treated separately. Students who offer Ardhamāgadhi as distinct from other Prakrits, therefore, often find it difficult to understand the distinctive features of the language. I therefore undertook, at the suggestion of several of my students, to prepare a handy Manual for the use of University students of Ardhamāgadhi, embodying in it all matter relating to this language found in grammars of Heñacandra and others. As this Manual is chiefly intended for students who begin their study of this language for the first time, and without a philological grounding, I have not burdened the treatment with technical terms of philology, though I hope I have treated the subject systematically enough to make it a fair preparation for advanced philological study of Prakrit languages.
In preparing this Manual I have made use of the indigenous grammars of Hemacandra and Vararuci (both recently edited by me), Pischel's Grammatik der Prakrit Sprachen, and several other works like the Ardhamāgadhi Reader by Banarasi Das Jain, M.A., Lahore, and the
