28 SANSKRIT, PRAKRIT, AND APABHRAN?A
agree against the east in assimilating ty to cc and ks to cck, against the representation of ty as tiy and the assimilation to kkh ; the east again is marked by the use of,£ for primitive az as against o, and by its rejection of r in favour of /. This eastern dialect may fairly be regarded as a forerunner of the Ardha- magadhI of the grammatical tradition, though that language has been largely affected by western influences in its later form. An inscription in a cave on the Ramgarh hill, probably of the second century B. c, reveals to us the precursor of the later Magadhl, since it shows its characteristics, e for o, I for r, kkh for ks, and f for s.
Our next information of a definite character regarding the dialects is afforded not so much by the various inscriptions of the post-Acokan period as by the dramas of Acvaghosa, which may be regarded as good testimony for the period c. A. D. 100. Here we find dialects which may justly be styled Old ArdhamagadhI, Old CaurasenI, and Old Magadhl; of these the former may well have been the dialect in which, as tradition asserts, Mahavlra preached his doctrines and established Jainism, and in which Buddhist teachers carried on their work. 1 The early Jain scriptures, however, have admittedly perished, and the actual canon of the Cvetambaras now extant is redacted in a form strongly influenced by the later south-western speech Maharastri, while later texts are written in what has been fairly called Jain Maharastri, and the Digambaras adopted under western influence what has been styled Jain (pauraseni. The canonical language of Buddhism, on the other hand, is more ancient ; it is not, however, ArdhamagadhI, but is distinctly of a western type, perhaps more closely connected with AvantI or Kaucambl than any other region. To the group of old Prakrits belongs also the mysterious PaicacI, in which the famous Brhatkatha of Gunadhya was written ; its home is still uncertain ; it has been connected by Sir G. Grierson 2 with the north-western dialect of the Acokan inscriptions on the one side and the modern languages of the north-west, which with dubious accuracy he has styled Picaca ; against this may be set, inter alia, the fact that the north-western
1 Cf. Keith, IHQ. i. 501 ff.
- Pisaca Lang., pp. 1 ff. ; ZDMG. Ixvi. 49 ff. ; JRAS. 1921, pp. 424 ff. ; IA. xlix.
U4; AMJV. i. H9ff.
