Jinamanjari 1996 04 No 13

Author(s): Jinamanjari
Publisher: Canada Bramhi Jain Society Publication

Page 87

The problem is, according to Dr. Chandra, that "the characteristics of the language of this canonical work should be of an archaic nature in comparison with that of later Ardhamagadhi and other Prakrit works. But it is not so as it has continuously undergone changes willingly or unwillingly at the hands of generations of preachers and copyists even after the canon was put to writing.... As the tradition goes the emphasis was on the meaning and not on the medium."
Compounding this problem was regional mobility. As Jains from the north-east region of the sub-continent moved westward, the original oral and written transmissions of the Agamic Ardhamagadhi tradition were impacted by such Ashokan dialects as Svaraseni, and more consequentially, Maharastri Prakrit. This would eventually lead to a jungle of variant textual readings with no uniformity of language.
As Dr. Chandra states, "in the absence of any earlier grammatical treatise it could not be possible to protect the original form of Ardhamagadhi. Secondly, works on Prakrit grammar are of late origin having a time gap (with the Ardhamagadhi) of one thousand to seventeen hundred years ( i.e. of Vararuci, Canda and Hemacandra). These grammatical treatises do not help us in deciding the original form of Ardhamagadhi for editing those canonical works which are comparatively regarded as the earliest compositions."
It is his contention, however, that with a thorough comparison of all extant Agamic Ardhamagadhi palm-leaf and paper manuscripts with the linguistic, stylistic and contentbased features of the Ashokan and Pali dialects, it is possible to extract the rudimentary Ardhamagadhi content and context. In a mammoth undertaking, Restoration of the Original Language of Ardhamagadhi Texts is the first step of what will hopefully be an ongoing project -- a comprehensive explication of the entire Agamic collection.
For this study Dr. Chandra has selected ten words and, using a statistical methodology, compiled a textual database of
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