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Nāsaketari Kathā
471
old Prakstas have been transformed into the different later vernaculars, and as little is known of the nature and causes of the motive powers that governed this development. Śaurasenī, e.g., forms the genitive by adding the case-termination -assa, derived from Saṁskrta -asya, and, as the latter, amalgamated with the noun into one single word, e.g. devassa. Modern Hindi again, a descendant of Śaurasenī, adds the particle -kā, which, being derived from an old -kiaa, shows, by the preservation of the initial k, that it was never felt as a 'termination', but remained a separate ‘particle' (cp. Sir George Grierson's statements, 'Linguistic Survey of India', Vol. IX, Part II, on p. 328 ): e.g. deva kā. Quite different, according to Sir George Grierson (1. c.), was the fate of the old -karau, by means of which the genitive was formed in Western Rājasthāni: its development to modern -ro proves, by the elision of the k, that it has, in the course of time, become a real 'case-ending', as in devaro. We have only the first and the last step of this change before us. We do not known when, why, and how the main part of the old inflectional system was abandoned, in favour of the new agglutinative one, by Hindi and the other Aryan languages of the Central Circle' (by Gujarātī and Rājasthānī with the exception of the genitive and dative), nor do we known when, why, and how the languages of the 'Outer Circle', as well as Gujarātī and Western Rājasthānī in the case of the genitive and dative, came to proceed even farther, and began to develop a second synthetical system of declension and conjugation.
Another unsolved problem is why and when the vast stores of more or less late tatsamas and tadbhavas were introduced into the modern dialects, driving out their old Prākrta equivalents, that had been developed by manifold early phonological changes, so that e.g. (Beames, 'Comparative Grammar of the Modern Aryan Languages of India', Vol. I, 1872, p. 14 ) 'Hindi has rāta, rāga, nāgarī, gaja for Saṁskṛta rātri, rāga, nāgarī, gaja, where Prakrta has only rāi, raa, nāаri, gaa'. Thus, we have, on the one hand, the pure, regularly
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