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Vol XXII, 1998
REVIEW
243
word-form By way of preparing the background of his researches, Dr Chandra had published three works to do the spadework The first one was about discovering the ancient archaic Ardhamāgadhi language of the 5th century BC when Mahāvīra delivered his sermons in that language to the laity The next one was about the restoration of the onginal language of the Ardhamāgadhi texts And the third one was the exploration of the ancient traits of the Ardhamāgadhi language from the Prakrit Grammar of Hemacangra, and those of others The author knows well that right from the times of the 24th Tirthankara Mahāvīra, the emphasis has been on the contents of the sermons delivered by the great Arhat, than about the exact nature of the language, since the sermons were essentially oral, that it was the task of the direct principal disciples, known as Ganadharas, to reduce them to laconic aphoristic texts and preserve them in oral tradition, and that the texts thus preserved in oral traditions were sought to be reduced to written documents much later, from time to time centuries after the demise of Mahāvīra But, being a linguist by profession, the editor has taken up the uphill, and almost impossible, task of discovering the onginal nature of the language of the times of the great Tirthankara, and has been working on it with utmost missionary zeal in this he has obtained the commendations and encomiums from veteran scholars of Prakrt language and Jainism, like Prof A.M. Ghatage, Prof GV Tagare, Pt Nathmal Tatia Prof SR Banerjee, Shn J P Thaker, Shri M A Dhanky, Prof Sagarmal Jain and many others, since it is beyond controversy that the language in which Lord Mahāvīra taught his sermons was definitely archaic Ardhamāgadhi It should be noted that the editor has gone about the task undertaken by him here very systematically First he has presented the concordance of the orthographic variants sūtra-wise from the editions of the Mahāvīra Jain Vidyalay, the Āgamodaya Samiti, the Jain Vishvabharatı, the Sılänka's commentary and from several earliest known manuscripts of the 13th, 14th, and 15th centuries Nest he has documented variation between writing the nasal consonant as a dot or homo-organic (para-sarvarna) nasal, between the n and n, between preservation, voicing or elision of the intervocalıc stops or the stop-constituents of aspirate stops Dr Chandra has given, in the fourth section statistical information about
