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INTRODUCTION
59
portions of plays, gāthās from Hāla's Kośa and poems like Rāvaņavaho. His strength as a Prākrit poet is mainly based on his thorough grounding in Sanskrit language and literature, his ability to corrupt Sanskrit words into Prākrit, directly or analogically, by applying the rules of Vararuci's grammar, and lastly, on his facility of handling various metrical forms including the varietes of gāthā. It is but natural that the Prākrit of Candralekhā sounds artificial, much different from the lively expression in genuine Prākrit literature.
Minor dialectal differences apart, the classical Prākrit stage, as distinguished from Sanskrit, characterises itself by certain phonetic peculiarities: the loss of vowel sounds ?, ?, ai and au; the reduction of three sibilants to one; the final syllable to be necessarily a vowel, at times with anusvāra or nasalisation; simplification of conjunct groups through processes like assimilation; and the law of quantity which brings about shortening of long vowels before double consonants, reduction of several consonants to two and sometimes loss of one of the two consonants after an original long vowel or after a vowel which was originally short and has only been lengthened at the same time.
Speaking about its phonetic aspect, with Sanskrit at one end and the rise of Modern Indian languages at the other, the intervening stage of Prākrit in its wide sense or Middle Indo-Aryan can be split into various consecutive sub-stages : Old or Early Middle Indo-Aryan (Early Prākrit Stage ), Transitional Middle Indo-Aryan, Second Middle Indo-Aryan (Prākrit Proper), and Third or Late Middle Indo-Aryan (Apabhramśa). The first stage keeps the intervocal single stops intact; during the transitional period they get voiced or spirantised; and in the Prākrit Proper they drop off from the speech. Apabhramsa presupposes almost entirely the Prākritic vocabulary; and then it is an attempt at the grammatical approximation to the language of the people. These sub-stages can be roughly illustrated by various Prākrit dialects : Inscriptional Prākrit, Pāli, Paiśācī; Saurasenī, Māgadhī; Māhārāştrī; and Apabhramśa. This marking of sub-stages is true so far as theoretical evolution in concerned; but once these stages are given a
1
H. Jacobi: Ansgewählte Erzälungen in Māhārāştri, Intro., p. XII, Leipzig 1886. S. K. Chatterji : Indo-Aryan and Hindi, p. 84, Ahmedabad 1942.
2
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