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lars including Senart himself were not happy with the reading. The tu prefixed to dampati is difficult to solve. T. W. Rhys Davids and William Stede's Pali English Dictionary, The Pali Text Society, London, ( 1972 ) has explained the formation of the word thus :
The orthography of manuscripts is some- times responsible for the selection of a reading particularly of a Jain manuscript. The peculiar way of writing na and na, y and th, ş and ph, jh and bh and many other conjuncts makes us responsible for a wrong selec- tion. Unless one is thoroughly conversant with the calligraphy of Mss, one cannot do any justice to the reading of a Prakrit passage. I need not dwell upon this point here in detail.
iii) Selection of readings
Leaving aside the orthographic representation of Prakrit, we shall now pass on to the next problem, i.e, selection of readings. It is a fact worth noting here that sometimes some editions are responsible for the peculiar, forceful and incongruous reading of a text. In this respect, we shall divide our examples into two groups. In group A, some of the grammatical texts are discussed, where the selection of a particular reading, instead of another, has caused us trouble in determining the linguistic features of a particular language. In group B, the readings of some Prakrit texts are analysed.
A. Grammatical texts
Let us first take Senart's edition of Ka- ccayana's Pali Grammar. Under the sutra- jāyāya tudam-jāni patimhi (II. 7. 24. No. 34)
-jāyā iccetāya tudamjāni iccete adesă honti patimhi pare. jäyāya pati tudam pati jāyāya pati jänipati. Senart has read the sentence as tu-dampati meaning 'husband and wife', and after that the word is included in all the Pali Dictionaries. But most of the scho-
"Tudampati (dual ) husband and wife. I turdial. for du, Skt dve. dampati from dama-domus Skt. daypati = Gk. despotes ; cf. also Kern Toev. 11. 93. who compares tuvantuva for duvanduva ]."
In reality, the word is not tudampati, but simply, dampati as in Sanskrit, meaning husband and wife. tu is, in fact an emphatic particle meaning 'but', and the passage means, but (=tu) when jāyā is compounded with pati, we get the compound as dampati, jänipati and jäyāpati.
Coming to the field of Prakrit, the situation seems to be worse For one word, we could have several forms in Prakrit and at times it is difficult to think which one is correct. Take, for example, the reading isi in Cowell's edition of Vararuci's Prakrita-prakasa. Cowell has accepted the reading isi with a short initial i under the vrtti of a sutra id-isat-pakva-svapna-vetasa-vyajanamặdangāngāreşu, 1.3 i.e., (in a group of words beginnig with işat etc. i is substituted for the first a ), whereas he has given the variant reading with long i in the foot-note as isi. In fact, the reading with long i is the correct one, as in all the editions of all Prakrit grammarians so far known to us, the word isi with long i at the initial is given, which is also Cowell's reading in
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