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INTRODUCTION
15
the light of the illustrations noted by PISCHEL's Grammatik and after taking into account similar cases from Kaṁsavaho because both the works belong to the same part of India, to the same period of literature and possibly to one and the same author. In such cases where grammarians give alternative or optional forms and where I entertained even a slight suspicion that it is not unlikely that others might have some other alternatives to suggest, I have carefully noted the actual readings below in the foot-notes.
The scribal irregularity which has repeated some thirty verses of the Third Canto at the close of the Second Canto has given an opportunity to the editor to test the correctness of the procedure of text-constitution adopted by him. In fact for iii. 31-62 the Ms. supplies a double version of the same verses : I have adopted one reading and relegated the other to the foot-notes with the word “Also". A careful study of the readings accompanied by the word "also" shows that the tendencies detected are quite right and the scribes themselves are responsible for many errors some of which, I think, might have arisen out of the orthographical similarities, etc., of some South Indian script (possibly Malayālam, as I have suggested) through which the original Ms. has been handed down. My changes of ļ to d, ņdh to ņth, mm to mh, etc., are clearly justified by the alternative readings available for this portion. In the case of these verses the number of my independent improvements is negligibly small. I would request the critical readers to study the readings on iii. 31-62 specially to get an idea of the nature of the text and its dialectal characteristics.
Most of the verses can be satisfactorily construed, and some of them offer a pleasant and refreshing study. In spite
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