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On the Eighteen Debt Languages
the contemporary society. Because the number of the regional languages. making allowance for the inclusion of the Dravidian too, in 878 A.D. could not be the same as it was in the days of the Nayadhammakahao. It must have been a large one. Hence we can say with certainty that Udyo. tana too adhers to the same number of traditional importance. But the true value of this dated author's list lies in its illustrating the colloquial format of the Sixteen Languages, the galaxy of specimens of which can rarely be found elsewhere.
Thus the number Eigeteen which formerly denoted the Dest languages in the early literature of the Ardhamāgadhi Canon, has been adhered to by the later Jaina authors in Prakrit, Sanskrit and Kannada. And this number it appears was keeping for long its hold on the Kannada people to such an extent that there has come down in the Kannada language an idiom kaown as Hadinențu jatigaļu, 1 eighteen castes, possibly indicating thereby that at some juncture of the cultural history of Karnatak the importance of this numerical group of languages has been replaced by that of the same group of castes.
14. According to Shri S.B. Joshi, this idiom is connected with the Agastya legend in
the Tamil tradition. Vide Karnāļaka-Sanskytiya Pūrvapishike I, Dharwar 1967, p. 64,
