________________
10
LĪLĀVAI
(sic) ; on the contrary it is absent inostly after the i-sound; but the Inscription is vacillating. Beside niýa (9) stands nia (12) ; 14 has iya and 13 even neja= naiva. The oldest MSS. write ya after all vowels before a and â in Ardhamāgadhi, Jaina-Mahārāsţrī and Jaina-Sauraseni, and for these dialects ya is characteristic. Therefore correct are such writings as indija = indriya, hiyaya=hrdaya; giya- gita; dihiyā= dirghikā; ruya = ruta; duya= duta ; teya- - tejas ; loja = loka. One however says only ei = eti ; loe= loke ; dūo = dūdaḥ, uija= ucita, uīm= *rtūni. Illustrations are found many times in the previous and following paragraphs. Wrongly Jainas carry over this and other modes of writing from Ardhamāgadhi, JainaMāhārāsţrī and Jaina-Saurasení to other dialects also."
Dr. D. C. Sircar has contributed a paper on the Būrhikhar (Dt. Bilaspur, M. P.) Brāhmi Inscription, QJMS, Culture and Heritage Number, Bangalore, 1956 (pp. 221-24); and some extracts may be given here: The text of the Inscription runs thus :
Payāvatiya dana Bhāradayiya
kārita ti (11) This image is the gift of Prajāvati (and) has been caused to be made by Bhāradvājī'. 'The language of the Inscription is Prākrit. Interesting from the orthographical point of view is the yaśruti in the names Payāvati for Prajāvati and Bhāradāyī for Bhäradvāji. But there is no case in which a surd has been modified into a sonant.' 'The epigraph may be palaeographically assigned to a date about the close of the First Century B.C.
Linguistically ya-śruti is a natural phenomenon. Something like this is already known to Pāṇini VIII. 3. 18-9; and the discussions of earlier Sanskrit phoneticians closely correspond to those about sa-śruti in Prākrit. 'From an etymological point of view', says Jacobi, it is more self-consistent that the ya-śruti should be written after all vowels, because it is the remnant of a lost consonant.' Professor L. V. Ramaswami Aiyar, Ernaculam, informs me that a fourteenth century Malayälam grammar (written in Sanskrit ), called Lilātilakam, refers to the sa-śruti of Prakrits as yakāracchāyā (his letter dated 28. i. '44 ). In some of the Modern Indian Languages a few traces of it can be detected here and there :
1 See Paņini's Grammar and the Influence of Prakrit on Sanskrit by V.
Bhattacharya, Commemorative Essays Presented to Grierson, pp. 157-59.
Lahore 1933. 2 The Kalpasūtra of Bhadrabahu. Intro. pp. 20-21, Leipzig 1879.
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