52 CIUMACARIU cation. SC. quotes the following lines under the name of Catur- mukha to illustrate the non-position making character of an Anus- vāra appearing on the end syllable of a word: haum Ajjuņu, tumha, eum raņu/SC. IV 2 (a). Compare with this the second Pāda in the following Ghattā found in the 11. Kadavaka of the 67. Sandhi (Jayadrathavadha) of RC.: kuru paccāriu Ajjuneņa te tumhaim, so haum, eu ranu. rakkaho sisu Jayaddahaho, lai dharahu savvu maim ekku khaņu. The resemblance of b in the above with the line cited in SC. is unmistakable. A close study of the two epics of Svayambhū may reveal some more such resemblances. 6. GRAMMATICAL PECULIARITIES OF PC. I-XX 1. Orthogrphy $1. Manuscripts of Apabhrarnsa texts are notorious for their erratic orthography. Not only different Mss. of a particular text spell a particular word differently but one and the same Ms. is discon- certingly inconsistent with regard to the spelling of one and the same word. Five factors are responsible for most of these vaga- ries of Apabhramśa orthography: defective alphabet, defective calli- graphy, dialectal variation, modernization and scribal ignorance. Short e and o, the Anunāsika, nasalized v and yaśruti and va- śruti are characteristic of the Apabhramsa sound system, while they are unknown to the phonetic system of Sanskrit. No new characters, however, are developed to represent them. They are expressed by the characters for their phonetic near-equivalents. Short e and o are represented either by ē and 6 thus sacrificing the quantity, or by i and u, thus sacrificing the quality, of the original sounds. The Anunâsika is written either as an Anusvāra, or is omitted alto- gether. m, mv and v with or without the nasilization of the prece- ding vowel alternatively stand for the nasalized v, y and v serve to express ya-śruti and va-śruti or the latter are not expressed at all. $2. Secondly, we can well understand what a fruitful source of confusion can hurried, careless or obscure handwriting prove, when textual transmission was solely dependent upon copying on the part of successive generations. This applies to the copyists who were ignorant of the language of their Mss. On the other hand an edu- cated copyist is also liable to alter the text, if he claims some liter- ary interest. The potentiality of the copyist for altering the origi- nal text assumes greater significance if we remember the fact that the language of these texts was in certain particulars not far re- moved from the spoken language of the day, which was constantly but subtly changing from generation to generation and hence it was quite easy and natural for an ordinary scribe to substitute for the the original form, a developed or dialectical form which but slight- ly varied from the original. This substitution was hardly a con- scious process, so that the modernization worked in a random fashion, and as in most cases we possess the MSS. whose copying date is removed by several centuries from the date of composition (1) Critical description and studies of the grammatical facts of Ap. will be found in Jacobi, 1918, 1921; Alsdorf, 1928, 1936, 1937; Bhayani, 1945; Tagare, 1948.
