Grammar Of Apabhramsa

Author(s): Madhusudan Mishra
Publisher: Vidyanidhi Prakashan

Page 13

A Grammar of Apabhramsa
(a) One was the older and archaic language of the hymns, which had ceased to be spoken even by the learned priests in their daily life.
(b) The other was the spoken language of the priests and some socially elevated groups, wbich was very conservative and little prone to change. It was a secular language corresponding to the sectarian language of the hymns. The hymns were however composed in the older language itself even by the younger generation of the priests, because it was after all their literary language, their second or learnt language in the modern sense of the term.
(c) The third was the language of the common people which can only be reconstructed on the basis of the later form of the language.
In phonology, the spoken language was not much different from the language of the higher social order. Only the final stops were very weakly pronounced and the visarga was almost unheard. The diphthongs tended to be pronounced as monophthongs.
The declension al pattern was simple. In plural, the dative and genitive as well as instrumental and ablative had largely fallen together. In singular also, the dative and genitive had largely fallen together and instrumental and ablative were beginning to do so. The pronominal endings were gradually replacing the nominal endings in ablative and locative singular.
The conjugational system was also simple. There was emphasis on a uniform a-conjugation. There was a tendency to take the third person plural present forms as basic, so that the other forms were based on these stems. Thus there was sunva-ti (for su-no-ti) on the basis of sunva-nti, and so on.
Both in declension and conjugation there was no dual.
The verb as (be) was not restricted to the root class, but it was also conjugated according to other classes. It was also conjugated outside the present system and took the past participal suffix •ta (forming s-ta), which may be seen in use more than two thousand years later in Hindi (in the form of thā).