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Paramatma-prakasa
shows a good deal of vacillation between and e in the Inst. sg. forms such as deve or devim and karagena or karanina; in the Loc. sg. forms such as deve or devi, and in forms like ke vi or ki vi, jeva 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 hatthim. Secondly, Devanagari Mss. vacillate between i and e before the conjuncts as in mukkha or makkha, ikka or ikka, billa 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 reduced to i and u. In Kannada e is both short and long, so the Kannaḍa Mss. felt no need of changing it to i. If we look to the corresponding counterparts in Sanskrit and Prakrit, 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 so ji and 18 jí as sõjji and jöjji, Bambhu is always shown as io Bamhu which might be allowed by Hema. (iv 412); but söjj and jöjj cannot be adequately explained.
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Value of their Tradition-There is another explanation also for this vacillation. Apabhramia was once a popular speech allied to Old-Rajasthnäι, Old-Hindi, Old-Gujaratt, 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 Daulatarama, does not represent the very language of Daulatarama, 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.-prakata is a homogeneous one. The forms that we have taken for comparison, excepting the Inf. of purpose form musahu and the Gerund in *ppinu which occur only once, are repeatedly met with in our text. Hemaca
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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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