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CANDALEHĀ
and long vowels are not rightly distinguished, for instance, niara for ņiara, pāara for pāära, turiaṁ for turiam; a short vowel with anusvāra and a long vowel are often mutually confused, for instance, dāni for dāni, ki for kim; a duplicate consonant is not properly distinguished from a consonant preceded by an anusvāra, as in, samimdha for samiddha, tassa for taṁsa, viňkhambha for vikkhambha; conjunct groups are written, almost regularly, as khkh, thth, dhdh; very often aspirated and unaspirated consonants serve each other's purpose; more than once ţ and th stand for ļ and ạh, 1 for i, ph for bh, k for t, d for dh, nn for nh, mm for moh; sometimes ļ is used for 2 (also in the chāyā, though rarely); some consonants are indiscriminately written, one for the other, p & v, b & v, and I & n. Such lapses are found scattered all over the Prākrit text in a bewildering quantity. Some of these, no doubt, have arisen out of the peculiarities of the Malayālam and Grantha characters and the mode of writing Prākrits adopted therein. Copyists, who were not quite well-versed with Prākrit phonology, have not been able to read correctly the ādarsa from which they prepared the copies. Lastly, we have another set of scribal lapses in this text as written in our MSS.: what looks like ya-sruti is seen in words like sayala, loya, samaya etc.: this may be partly due to the influence of Trivikrama's Prākrit grammar which has been quite popular in the South and partly to the preservation of Sanskrit medial y; more than once m is retained at the end of a metrical foot; nasal conjunct groups are often written as in bhingi, bhañjiā rather than as in bhimgi, bhamjiā; usually conjuncts are written like hm and hn, and not mh and nh; cch rather than ch is written at the initial of a word ; in some words, here and there, we find ai, au, s, pr and a visarga retained as in their Sanskrit counterparts; and we get declensional forms like meinim, lilām etc. It is true that in many respects the dramatic Prākrits, as contrasted with Ardhamāgadhi and even Jaina Māhārāstrī. are moulded after the model of classical Sanskrit from which later on even ready-made forms were subjected to phonetic corruption and imported into Prākrit. The above lapses are definitely due to Sanskrit influence which was working on our text too, for obvious reasons: the contiguous presence of the Sanskrit chāyā with the Prākrit text, the neglect of Prākrit passages in preference to the chāyā in studying the drama, constant checking and correcting of the Prākrit text with the aid of the chāyā, and lastly, the confirmed habit of copyists to write Sanskrit works usually and Prākrit works rarely. We come across these lapses in a greater abundance especially in those texts
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