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ORIGINS OF MULTIPLE MEANINGS OF DES’YA WORDS*
For studying the problems relating to the Deśya side of Prakrit lexicology, Hemacandra's Dešināmamālā (= DN) is the most obvious basic source. A critical examination of the Deśya items it records, leads us to several fresh lines of investigation. I have tried to follow a few of them in my Studies in Hemacandra's Dešināmamālā (Banaras, 1965)1. Here I propose to indicate and illustrate another such line of exploration based on orthographical considerations, and affording us glimpses into the character of Hemacandra's Deśya sources.
In my above mentioned studies I lave devoted considerable space to examining the orthographic variation among the Deśya items of DN., and have tried to show how in several cases the scribal confusion might have been responsible for producing spurious words. But alongside with it, there was another fertile source of confusion and error, viz., the orthography and the homonymy of the Sanskrit and especially Prakrit words given as meaning-equivalents for the Deśya items. This source of errors is subtler and more complex than the orthography of the recorded Deśya items themselves. Prakrit abounds in homonyms and where illustrative materials were absent or undecisive, ambiguity frequently led lexicographers into wrong tracks.
Hemacandra has actually commented on a few cases of this type in the commentary on DN. 6, 8. For example, he has stated that some authorities, misguided by wrong spelling in their sources, had given ari-feat: a heap of berries' (instead
* Read before the Prakrit and Jainism Section of the twentythird session of the All India Oriental Conference held at Aligarh on the 27th, 28th and 29th October, 1966.
1. Included in the present collection.
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