Comprehensive Critical Dictionary of Prakrit Languages Volum 01

Author(s): A M Ghatage
Publisher: Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute

Page 26

(19)
what is written as an a is treated as a separate phoneme before the semi-vowels, fricatives and the aspirate h. as a para suparna before the stops, and as a in the final position. The distinction between short and long " and and the mark of nasalisation of vowels will be treated as mere diacritical marks and will not affect the alphabetical order.
and the
S.
phones in some dialects like Magadhi the use of may be taken as a matter of free variation in other Prakrit dialects as is reflected in the tradition, which runs parallel to the use of
77
and the corresponding pure vowel. The etymolog cally valid distinction between the presence or absence of a n sound in the corresponding Sanskrit words may not be allowed to decide the writing system of MIA, when they have completely merged together. Of course if the dialect shows a phonemic difference between the geminated and geminated or nn, it will have to be kept intact.
(5) The remaining writing conventions may be merely stated. The writing for which is found in the southern MSS. and editions is uniformly followed The representation of a double aspirated consonant by using two aspirates together, which is found in sorae of the earlier editions of Prakrit works will be represented by the more phonetically accurate method of using the unaspirated consonant as the first member of the cluster. The or a will not be distinguished from the normal or 41, as was done by Pischel in his Prakrit grammar because it is not found necessary. The diffsrence between the short and long and it sounds can be ascertained from their environment and hence not always necessary to be indicated. This may be necessary only in the case of the final syllable in Apbrams, where the principle of anceps is not vald. The MS. tradition of writing and in place of short and it is often retained without normalisation. because it cannot be precisely decided to what extent it is phonetically diferent in view of the tradition current in lado-Aryan languages to consider and as shortened forms of and air. Thus in the environment of a cluster which follows, no distraction of a phasmic nature is found between i][] or je:], and the sounds may be really different in ech case. The citations will follow the writing found in the
editions used.
V. TRANSLITERATION
The transliteration used is the usual one for IndoAryan languages. Particularly to be noted are a asm, ass, ass and fan as h, the nasalisation of vowels shown as on Devanagari letters as. Accents are not marked. Taking into consideration all the Prakrit dialects together, the alphabetical order will be as follows: ,,,,,,,,.,,, sit, (:) ., ग, व, (ङ), छ, ज, झ, (ञ), ट ठ ड ढ ण त थ व ,,,,,, E, I, I, I, A, . In following this alphabetical order, au attempt is made to keep it as close to Sanskrit as possible, because nearly all words will be followed by their Sanskrit equivalents. For this purpose
VI. ABBREVIATIONS
Various types of abbreviations have to be used in a comprehensive dictionary in order to make the work as compact as possible. These abbreviations fall into a number of groups: (i) abbreviations of grammatical terms and terms of general nature used in textual and literary criticism. These have been mostly standardised and they will be easily known. (ii) There are symbols which will be used to make clear some aspects of linguistics which, otherwise, will take a lot of space if explained in so many words. (i) Then the names of various languages and dialects will have to be indicated by abbreviations and also the names of ancient writers and modern scholars will be abbreviated when reference is made to them. There will be abbreviations of the names of the series of publ canoes and other bibliographical information to be given. Above all. a dictionary which is giving quotations from various books on au extensive scale must make use of abbreviations of the names of books which form the corpus of the dictionary. As these names of books are expected to occur thousands of times, it is essential to make the abbreviations self-explanatory or at least easily recallable, even at the cost of making them a little longer, when once they have been noted.
Abbreviations which occur in books which are to be read continuously and which deal with a specific subject or topic will not be found suitable in a dictionary which is to be constantly referred to and in which the context extends over one small entry and gives no help in guessing the source The practice followed in the lexicons of the classical languages of Europe viz. to use the name of the author first and then indicate his work, will have to be reversed in the case of the classical languages of India. The primary reference will be to the book and only in case of homophonous titles of books will the outhor's name will be given to distinguish between them. In the Indian literature as a whole, the names of books are found to be longer than those of the authors and homophony is prevalent in both the types of names. The method used is to combine the abbreviated name of the book, followed by the abbreviated name of the author in brackets. As the number of books to be referred to goes on increasing, the abbreviations also bec ne longer to avoid overlap.