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N. M. KANSARA
SAMBODHI
The traditional works of Prakrit grammar are styled on the traditional Sanskrit grammars structured according to the Pāņinian system or many others upto Hemacandra. They are in the form of Sūtras in Sanskrit with a commentary which explains and supplements the sutras by illustrations and technical discussions where necessary. As has been observed by Nitti-Dolci, Māhārāstrīgrammarians and the rest of other Prakrit grammarians wrote in Sanskrit; among them there were some, like Hemacandra and Kramadīśvara, who conceived Prakrit grammar as an appendix to Sanskrit grammar. There existed in Sanskrit for every system of grammar a Dhātupātha in which the verbs were collected together in a section. The Prakrit grammarians were of the opinion that students would refer to them and be able to construct different types of Prakrit verbal forms, in anology with nouns. The Prakrit grammarians did not take into account the verbs, at the time of framing the rules on the phonetic correspondences. Consequently they have expounded the alterations that the affixes have undergone without troubling their mind about the form of the verbal themes. They thought of filing up the lacunae by inserting as examples certain verbal themes of Prakrit, either in the section on conjugation or in the small supplementary list of Dhātvādeśas, rather as a collection of samples, than an exposition of the whole. We can hardly say anything about grammars of the Jaina-dialects. Without a grammar, probably these dialects had been employed the most and had spread far and wide in India. Since the Prakrits of the Jaina canonical and non-canonical texts offered strong similarities with Māhārāstrī, they preferred to use the grammars of Māhārāștrī by adopting it more or less according to their needs. It is due to this circumstance that Hemacandra who embarked upon teaching the diverse dialects of his religion dressed his materials about the frame-work of the sutras of Vararuci on classical Māhārāstrī. However, it so happens that a grammarian, while copying out merely inserts in his exposition certain facts taken from the languages of the texts that are of particular interest to him: the remarks on Ārsa or Ardhamāgadhi that Hemacandra has made in his commentary is the result of this attitude.
Modern linguists like Sukumar Sen have noted that the Prakrit speeches, recognised by the old grammarians, that occur in Sanskrit drama and in poems do not come in the direct line of development of Indo-Aryan. The Prakrits are almost entirely based on artificial generalisation of the second phase of MiddleIndo-Aryan and stand in the same relation to the latter proper as Classical Sanskrit stands to Vedic.
