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62
Paramātma-prakasa
shows a good deal of vacillation between i and e in the Inst. sg. forms such as deve" or devis and käranena or karanina; in the Loc. sg. forms such as deve or devi; and in forms like ke vi or ki vi, je va or jima, te va or tima, etc. But the Kannada Mss. uniformly accept e which may be short or long as required in the context. Even Hemacandra's Grammar shows this vacillation in forms like hatthin. Secondly, Devanāgari Mss. vacillate between i and e before the conjuncts as in mukkha or mõkkha, ēkka or ikka, bõlla or bulla, etc.. The Kannada Mss. uniformly show e and o and not i and u. I think, this vacillation is due to the fact that Sanskrit e. o are always long; to show them short, as we want short e and o in Apabh. (Hema. iv, 410), they were reduced to i and u. In Kannada e is both short and long, so the Kannada Mss. felt no need of changing it to i. If we look to the corresponding counterparts in Sanskrit and Prākrit, we find that e is preferred. So e appears to be really the earlier stage, and being short in pronunciation it came to be changed to i. The same is the case with o. Then these Kannada Mss. uniformly read sõ ji and iö ji as sõjji and jöjji; Bambhu is always shown as Bamhu which might be allowed by Hema. (iv 412); but sõjji and jöjji cannot be adequately explained.
Value of their Tradition-There is another explanation also for this vacillation. Apabhramsa was once a popular speech allied to Old-Rājasthnai, Old-Hindi, Old-Gujaräti, etc., which are the earlier stages of the presentday Hindi, etc. So copyists and reciters did make vowel changes, etc., in the light of contemporary pronunciation as it is clear from the manner in which works like Ramayana of Tulasidasa have undergone dialectal changes. What the copyists and even reciters minded were the contents and not the dialectal features. Even the Hindi commentary, printed in this edition, though attributed to Daulatarāma, does not represent the very language of Daulatarāma, as I have shown below. The Kannada Mss. therefore, are likely to be of use for the following reasons : some of the Mss, are sufficiently old and are copied from pretty older Mss.; and as they were preserved in a country where the spoken languages were completely different from Apabh., there was no scope for such changes as it happened in the North. So a critical edition of P.-prakasa should prefer e and o, short or long as needed by the context, in the above cases, because such readings are supplied by Kannada Mss. some of which preserve text-tradition even earlier than Brahmadeva.
Results of the above Comparison and Contrast-The Apabhramsa dialect of P.-prakasa is a homogeneous one. The forms that we have taken for comparison, excepting the Inf. of purpose form munahu and the Gerund in šppinu which occur only once, are repeatedly met with in our text. Hemaca1 in Devanagari Mss. o is often represented by u with a vertical stroke on its head,
and the copyists at times took it for u only.
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