Collected Articles Of LA Schwarzschild On Indo Aryan 1953 1979

Author(s): Royce Wiles
Publisher: Australian National University

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THE POSSESSIVE ADJECTIVES OF LATE PRAKRIT
This theory is supported by Chatterji and Tessitori among others, though the latter thinks that merau and moral, occurring in the Old Western Rajasthani texts" bear an analogy to the Braj and Bundeli oblique forms me and mo".
Tagare derives mahara from maha+kara, mera from ma +kera, tuhara from tuha + kara; tera from tea> ta+kera.
Of these explanations, that of Sen is improbable on account of the rarity of the suffix -re, fira, a variant of the frequent -ala of Apabhramsa, OIA. -ala cf. rasala, racala in the Nayakumaracariu. Forms of the possessives in -I- never appear in Apabhramsa or even in Eastern texts like the Caryagitis, although this is the more usual variant of the adjectival suffix. Dave's theory seems to account very well for the sixteenth century Gujarati forms, which might have been analysed as ma+harau subconsciously by the speakers of this period, when the original formation of the possessives had fallen into oblivion. The theory leaves the Apabhramsa maharau, etc., quite unaccounted for, and assumes them to be unrelated, as they cannot be based on ma+harau because of the vowel lengths and because harau did not exist as a postposition in Apabhramsa. Further, the series of postpositions that Dave quotes as cognate is not with certainty related to ghara. (For a different, but also unconvincing explanation of rahain, etc. cf. Tessitori).
There remain the explanations which allow for some continuity in the evolution of the possessives and which involve the addition of a derivative of ky to the personal pronoun. Pischel and Tagare agree in postulating two forms "kära and kera, both from karya. As is well known, -kera is frequently used to indicate possession, and is often found with nouns and even more with pronouns in both Prakrit and Apabhramsa. In the case of pronouns it is almost invariably the genitive that is used before kera, with nouns it is sometimes the stem. (This renders Tagare's ma-kera, etc., improbable.) Thus Hála has maha-kera (v, 17); Sauraseni mamakera, lassakera, amhakera, etc., are found in the dramas from Bhasa onwards. Kera is fully recognized by the grammarians. Hemacandra, ii, 47, writes" idamarthasya kerah" (cf. the list of examples
18. K. Chatterji, Origin and Development of the Bengali Language. Calcutta, 1926, p. 813. L. P. Temitori, "Notes on the Grammar of the Old W. Rajasthani," IA. 1914-16, para. 83.
Tagare, Historical Grammar of Apadhramán, Poons, 1948.
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THE POSSESSIVE ADJECTIVES OF LATE PRAKRIT
given by Pischel in his commentary), and the form continues in Apabhramsa, (cf. Paumacariya of Svayambhu II, 118), and then in the works of Puspadanta (ef. Harivamsapurina, glossary: keraya), and it is used in the early stages of the modern vernaculars e.g. Old Guj. Bharatesvara-rāsaka 105: jai risahesara kera puta. It still occurs in the sixteenth century Awadhi of Tulsidas and Jayasi: Bandon padasaraj sab kere (Tulsidas) and hauns panditan kera pacchalaga (Jayasi), etc., quoted by Ayodhyasinh Upadhyaya,1 kerau often also occurs in its unshortened form in the OWR. texts of Tessitori and it survives into modern Gujarati (cf. Grierson *), E. Hindi, and Bihari. The distribution of kera, -era as a genitival postposition seems to have no relationship with the distribution of the type mera, so that it is difficult to argue in favour of a protoHindi dialect which favoured epenthesis and where kera was generalized rather than the hypothetical kära. Thus both OWR. and Bengali have the postpositional affix (kerau, but the posses sive pronouns belong to groups II and III. A purely phonetic explanation would also make it difficult to account for the complete absence of hamera and tumhera in the plural. The development must therefore be to some extent analogical, and the analogy is most likely to have come from the genitive of the personal pronoun. A link with the personal pronouns can be seen at various stages in the development of the possessive adjectives, for instance in the Eastern forms mor and for, and in occasional rarer forms such as mujjhāra (var. mujjhare) found in the Prabandhacintamani (p. 11, line 8).
In Mähäräştri the intervocalic consonants were lost early and the affix kera, when in composition with a pronoun, therefore lost its initial consonant. The fact that the possessive pronoun was often used in an unstressed position in the sentence led to further reduction, mahaera> *mahera, and under the influence of me, te there were formed the possessives mera and tera. This influence of me must belong to the pre-Apabhramás stage, as me and te, though widespread in all the Prakrits as unaccented forms and recognized by the grammarians, became more and more rare in Apabhramsa (only one example of me, for instance, in the whole of the Harivamsa purana). The line of development of group I of possessive pronouns was therefore the following:
Ayody sinh Upadhyaya, Hindi Bhaga aur make sähitya kā vikās, pp. 83 ff. G. A. Grierson, Kuhn's Zeilschrift, 38, 1905, pp. 913 ff.
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