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The Problem of T-Sruti
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to time due to the influence of changing Middle Indo-Aryan dialects. Randomly we would find decreasing conservations and increasing innovations till the Sacred Texts were committed to writing. In phonology, besides the old forms preserving an intervocalic t (as in say, hasati), we would have forms like hasadi and hasai, reflecting the successive stages of the phonological change. Similarly forms preserving an intervocalic aspirated stop, voicing it and reducing it to h would be found at the same time. Besides, in texts like the Curnis and the Vasudevahimdi, there is a tendency to occasional use fully or partly Sanskrit word-forms. During the later period, when literary Mahārāsțrı became dominant, the forms with the intervocalic consonant elided were the standard forms. In the case of the texts having a mixture of forms with elided, voiced and unvoiced intervocalic t the latter two come to be looked upon as free variation, and t and d as arbitrary insertions. The same applies to the preservation, voicing and reduction to h of intervocalic aspirated stops. Hence the scribes felt free to write t, d or omit them altogether in the former case and write voiced aspirate or h in the latter case. The period when many of the Mss. containing these peculiarities were eopied, seems to have been a period of deteriorating linguistic and scribal traditions. Preparations of Mss copies were not carefully supervised, checked and corrected. Ultimately, this resulted in a chaotic orthography as we ffnd in the Mss of VH and VHM. Only some such explanation can account for the writing phenomenon discussed here. It is very significant that neither Hemacandra's Prakrit grammar, nor any of the commentators on the Āgamas take any note whatsoever of these peculiarties. This clearly indicates that they latter were but aberrant scribal practices.
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