Collected Articles Of LA Schwarzschild On Indo Aryan 1953 1979

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

Page 31

NOTES ON THE DECLENSION OF FEMININE NOUNS IN MIDDLE INDO-ARYAN
BY L. A. SCHWARZSCHILD
"THE TENDENCIES OF Apahhrama in phonetics and grammar help to bridge the gap between typical Prakrit and the modern languages." A. Woolner expressed this view in 1928 when comparatively few Apabhramsa texts had been published and the remarkable continuity of the Indo-Aryan languages was accepted as a fact. Since then their general pattern of development, which appeared with simple clarity to Woolner, has often been obscured by the wealth of linguistic material of the Middle Indo-Aryan period that has come to light.
There is known to be a number of cases where Apabhraméa, as revealed in the texts, does not provide a link between Prakrit and the modern languages. There have been two alternative views on how such inconsistencies are to be explained.
Any feature of modern Indo-Aryan, Apabhramsa or Prakrit, that could not be linked with the language immediately preceding it, is regarded by some as a survival from a much earlier phase of IndoAryan, Le. Vedio, or even Indo-Iranian and Indo-European. For instance, the old pronoun of the third person, ana- is already moribund in the Rigveda, where it occurs only in the genitivelocative dual, avos; it does not occur in Sanskrit, Prakrit, or in Southern or Western Apabhramsa and yet it is regarded by some as the basis of the modern remote demonstrative pronoun: Braj seo, wuh, wah; Panjabi oh, uh, etc. This type of explanation dismisses the main literary languages, Sanskrit, the Prakrits, and Apabhramsa as artificial and seeks for the true continuity in the spoken language in as far as it is unattested by the written documents. Carried to extremes this view would make us believe in "a mysterious living language without written texts, as is usually claimed by philologists, without much documentary or philological evidence" a complaint sometimes made in the field of Romance philology.
A. Woolner, Introduction to Prakrit, 2nd edition, Lahore, 1928, p. 6.
8. K. Chatterji, Origin and Development of the Bengali Language, Calcutta, 1926, p. 837.
J. Bloch, L'Indo-Aryen, Paris, 1934, p. 198.
H. F. Muller, & Chronology of Falgar Latin, Halle, 1929.
JRAS, OCTOBER 1956.
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182 DECLENSION OF FEMININE NOUNS IN MIDDLE INDO-ARYAN
Some linguists, on the other hand, have laid stress on the connection between the spoken and the written languages throughout the history of Indo-Aryan. Incongruencies are therefore explained as independent creations: thus Baburam Saksena suggests that the pronoun seo, sesh, or seah of Eastern Hindi is not a survival of the Vedic ava-, but a new creation on the analogy of the proximate demonstrative pronoun yah. This type of explanation leads us to see a constant process of recreation in the development of the IndoAryan languages, rather than a continuous evolution.
I
Some of the inconsistencies between the consecutive phases of Indo-Aryan may be only apparent and this seems to be the case in the declension of feminines in Prakrit. The most striking feature of the declension of feminine nouns in Prakrit is extreme simplicity; the four oblique forms of Sanskrit have been virtually reduced to one. Sanskrit. Pali. malaya
Prakrit.
máláe
Feminine Instrumental
Dative
#
malay malayal Ablative, Genitive malayaḥ Locative malayam 30 Masculine Dative devaya devaya The declension of feminines ending in -i and - is parallel to the - declension.
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devie
There are, however, variants in some of the Prakrits, particularly in the inscriptions; e.g. Ardha-Magadhi, Jain Mähäräştri, and Mähârâştri have an ablative maldo, which is borrowed from the masculine ablative, and this is also found occasionally in the Sauraseni of the dramas. Further, Mähäräştri and Jain Mâhârâştri have the variants -da and di in the instrumental, genitive, and locative and according to the grammarians also in the ablative.
Pischel explained the usual Prakrit oblique in -e from the dative in-yai which replaced the other terminations in the spoken language. In support of this theory he quoted the fact that the dative ending -yai is used for the genitive-ablative ending -yah once in the Atharvaveda and frequently in the Brahmanas. There is a similar
Baburam Saksena, The Evolution of Aushdi, Allahabad, 1937, p. 180. *R. Pischel, Grammatik der Prakritsprachen, Strassburg, 1900, p. 250.