Book Title: Collected Articles Of LA Schwarzschild On Indo Aryan 1953 1979 Author(s): Royce Wiles Publisher: Australian National UniversityPage 16
________________ The Possessive Adjectives of Late Prakrit Br L. A. SCHWARZSCHILD Poss OSSESSIVE adjectives are not strictly essential parts of speech; their place can often be taken by the genitive of the personal pronouns. This has led to a certain lack of continuity in their development, which has, however, often been exaggerated. Apart from very isolated survivals like maia, the Sanskrit possessives had already died out in Prakrit. The Modern Indo-Aryan vernaculars have entirely new formations, the most widespread of which is that in . In the singular one can distinguish three main groups of possessive adjectives in r (1) Western Hindi, as characteristic of the first group has mēro, tero for the possessive. (Oblique forms of the pronoun are mo, muj, mohi, muhi, and to, tuj, tohi, tuhi.) (2) Gujarati and most of the Rajasthani dialects except Mewati belong to a second group whose main characteristic is the vowel --: Gujarati mārā, tāro (oblique base ma, ta). (3) Eastern Hindi and the Magadhan languages on the whole have -o- as the vowel of the possessive, thus Avadhi mor, för (oblique mo, to). The absence of any similarity with the oblique in group I shows that the possessive adjectives are not simply based on the modern oblique forms of the personal pronouns, but are older. The modern possessive adjectives and their distribution are in fact already foreshadowed by the Apabhraméa texts. The standard forms of Western Apabhramsa as given by Hemacandra are: 1st person: mahara pl. amhara 2nd person: tuhära These forms as well as a second person plural tumhara recur in the other Western Apabhramka texts, generally with the addition of svårthe-ka; e.g. Kumarapalapratibodha maharau, Sandesarasaka amhariya, etc. Possessives are rare in this dialect. Although there are no possessive adjectives of this kind in the earlier Digambara texts, the works of Joindu, and the few fragments of the Paumacaria of Svayambhu that have been published so far, there is a large number of forms of the possessive in the Hemacandes, iv, 434. R. Pischel, Grammatik der Prakritsprachen, p. 308. Strassburg, 1000, -12 128 THE POSSESSIVE ADJECTIVES OF LATE PRAKRIT later Digambara Apabhramsa texts. The plural is amharaya, tumharaya as in Western Apabhramsa. In the singular on the whole the forms of the type meraya, meri; teraya, teri outnumber those of Western Apabhramsa, which are also current. This applies to the major works of Puspadanta, but in the later Karakandacariu of Kanakamara the distribution is equal. In the Bhavisattakala, as pointed out by Alsdorf,' meraya occurs only once, while there are examples of tuharaya, tuhārī. This distinction between Digambara and Western Apabhramka shows that there has been a continuity of evolution, that forms of group I never belonged to Western Apabhramsa and the languages derived from it, while Digambara Apabhraméa represents a mixture or groups I and II. The origin of the Apabhramsa forms is not clear. The theory of Bopp and Lassen that the types I and II are a continuation of the Sanskrit madiya has been completely discarded since the days of Beames. The main theories since Lassen are the following: Sen derives the Apabhraméa forms from maha and tuka (mabh(y)a, tubh(y)a) with the affix -ra or -ara, cf. OIA. -ra (la), ala, madhura, bakula, srira, etc. Dave derives the sixteenth century Gujarati forms maharas and taharau from ma+haran and ta+harau.-harau itself he refers back to Sanskrit ghors which was also to have given the postpositions Arau, hraim, rahaim. Beames states that "there is no difficulty in connecting these adjectives with the older genitive of the noun formed with the affixes kera and kara... Popular Prakrit has such forms as mahakero, from which mera would naturally flow, and the rustic form of the same, namely maro, would be equally derived from mahakaro. Pischel explains the forms mahara, mahara as based on the genitive sg, maha kara, developed from karya without epenthesis. In his discussion with Hoernle he makes it clear that he considers wera, etc., derived from maha + kera. L. Alsdorf, Harivasapurina, p. 166. Hamburg, 1936. J. Beames, A Comparative Grammar of the Modern Aryan Languages of India. London, 1876, pt. ii, p. 311. 8. Sen. Comparative Grammar of Middle Indo-Aryan Indian Linguistics, vol. xii, 47. T. N. Davo, & Study of the Gujarati Language in the Sixteenth Century. London, 1935, p. 59. R. Pischel, 14. 1873, p. 121. -13Page Navigation
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