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Tessitori's Pioneering Work on the Uvaeśamālā ... : 87
an important tool for a correct appraisal of the original dialect, since the phonetic and orthographic differences are among the main ones between closely connected dialects such as Ardhamāgadhi (the dialect of the Svetāmbara Jaina Canon) and Jaina Māhārāștrī (the dialect of the post-Canonical scriptures). On the other hand, it is also the task of the editor of such texts to keep the medley of colours and not to give way to a linguistic normalization which would lead to an exceedingly clear-cut idea of the language: older forms of the Ardhamāgadhi type may appear in a text predominantly written in Jaina Māhārāştrī, and vice-versa. We are not surprised to see that Tessitori, who was, as is well-known, a linguist of a high-standard, showed great care to this aspect. This is evidenced both by his method of editing and by his linguistic analysis of the Uvaesamālā, which takes note of the most remarkable facts in phonology, morphology, syntax and vocabulary. His conclusion that the language of the Uvaesamālā is a Jaina Māhārāștrī of the older variety still holds valid today. Now that more texts have been published, we can say that the Uvaesamālā belongs to the same linguistic stratum as the so-called Prakirņakas, the latest category of texts belonging to the Jaina Canon: at this stage, the Ardhamāgadhi influence becomes rather limited, although it is still present in the form of “Ardhamāgadhīsms”, and the main Ardhamāgadhi characteristics affecting the morphology of the noun have disappeared: thus, for instance the nominative masculine singular in -e, characteristic of this dialect, is conspicuous by its absence, the ending now being -o, as is usual in Jaina Māhārāștrī; the ending of the locative singular in -amsi has been replaced by the normal Jaina Māhārāşțri ending ammi, whereas we observe the coming up of some peculiarities, definitely specific to Jaina Māhārāşțrī, such as the use of the emphatic particle je supporting an infinitive form in -um, evidenced twice in the Uvaesamālā?". The scrupulous regard of the philologist for the text investigated by him is equally marked by the attention paid to the metre: as expected, the prevailing metre of the Uvaesamālā is the so-called āryā of the classical type. However, Tessitori rightly
