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91
At that moment he was engaged in setting on fire the hole of the matkoțas'. “I am eradicating root and branch, those vile matkotakas who have troubled my son : Villains do not deserve anything better”.
Păiasaddamahannavo, Abhidhānarājendra, and Ratnacandraji's Ardha-Magadhi Dictionary all give this meaning to matkotaka and makkodaya. The Nighanțurăja has noted makorā, maṁkata - (19, 149) and makota- (19,150). Monier Willim's Sanskrit-English Dictionary records from lexicons markotapipilika ‘a kind of small black ant'.
makkodā- would invite comparision with PK. makkada(Sk markața). A late lexicon, viz., Rāmeśvara Śarman's Sabdarnālā has noted matka- in the sense of matkuņa-, and marka- occurs in Vedic language in the senses of eclipse', 'name of a demon'. But all these do not succeed in throwing light on the formation of makkoda- and we have no way of saying whether it contains a suffix - oda -. It is very likely that matka- is a late artificial creation from words like matkunaand matkotaka
6. Gujarati words with the suffix -odOccurrence of several words in Late Middle Indo-Aryan with the pejorative -pleonastic suffix -oda- suggests that the -ota- of the Late Sanskrit words like -bakoța- may have a Middle Indo-Aryan origin. The suffix -oda- has become frequent later on. For we find a number of formations with -od- (<MIAodaa-) current in New Indo-Aryan Languages like Gujarati. The following list of Gujarati words with the Suffix -od- though not quite exhaustive, is big enough to be significant :
kit-o lump of sediment kitod-o ibid. gap, gapp-o, gapp-ũ
gappod-o ibid. "bluff', 'hoax' gãdṁth-o 'knot’, tumour' 'gaṁthod -o 'knot of dry stem or root' gor 'family priest'
garod-o‘ibid of the Dhedh'.
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