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Preface
On the occasion of Dr Luise Hercus's retirement in 1991 from the Readership in Sanskrit which she has held since 1973 in the Faculty of Asian Studies of the Australian National University, some of her colleagues, friends and former pupils have decided to reprint in book form the collection of 26 articles in the field of Middle Indo-Aryan studies which she published under the name of L.A. Schwarzschild between 1953 and 1979.
Many of these articles will be well-known to scholars working in the field, but some of those published in commemorative volumes are less well-known and are not easy to come by. The majority deal with broad concepts, such as the future system, or the history of the infinitive in Middle Indo-Aryan, but even those which seem to be studies of individual words turn out, on cxaminiation, to be investigations of the fundamental principles upon which the words are based. Published together in this way these articles make clear the great value of the contribution which Dr Hercus has made to Middle Indo-Aryan studies, Their usefulness is increased by a Grammatical index and Indexes of Old, Middle and New Indo-Aryan words, compiled by Colin Mayrhofer and Royce Wiles respectively.
K.R. Norman Cambridge
