Page:The Sanskrit Drama.djvu/93

88 trary, is required in the case of men who live in the women's apartments, diggers of underground passages, keepers of drink shops, watchers, the hero himself in time of danger, and the Çakāra. Into which category the Duṣṭa falls is not certain; the Daçarūpa ascribes this Prākrit to low people in general.

Çaurasenī is ascribed to the hetaera by the Çāstra which gives Prācyā or eastern dialect to the Vidūṣaka, but it is clear that the Prācyā is a mere variety of Çaurasenī, from which it differs only in the use of certain expressions. This is borne out by the dramas, in which there is no real distinction between the speech of these two characters. With the Çaurasenī of the grammarians it shows remarkable parallels. It has r in lieu of changing it to l; it reduces the sibilants to s; and for the nominative masculine it has o. Further, it changes kṣ into kkh, not cch; for chard it has chaḍḍ, for mard, madd; for saçrīkam irregularly sassirīkaṁ with the double s despite the epenthetic vowel; and in the third singular future issiti. The gerund kariya is parallel to karia in Hemacandra's grammar; bhaṭṭā is the vocative of bhartṛ; iyaṁ is feminine as later iaṁ in Çaurasenī alone; bhavāṁ as nominative is comparable with bhavaṁ; bhaṇ is conjugated in the ninth class; viya is parallel to via for iva; and dāni with loss of i as a particle is similar to dāṇiṁ.

In other cases the forms of this Prākrit are clearly older than those of the grammarians' Çaurasenī. As in the other Prākrits of the drama, there is no softening or omission of intervocalic consonants, and no cerebralization of n. Further, initial y is kept, not reduced to j; the interjection ai in lieu of aï is supported by the language of the Girnār and Udayagiri inscriptions; in nirussāsam we have an older form than ūsasida of Çaurasenī; iñ and ny give ññ, not the later ṇṇ; dy gives yy (written y) for jj; tuvaṁ and tava are both manifestly older than the forms tumaṁ and tuha, while karotha is a remarkable example of the preservation of the old strong base. Old also is the preservation of the long vowel in bhavāṁ. In adaṇḍāraho and the dubious arhessi we have two variants on the rule of Çaurasenī, which has i as the epenthetic vowel in arh, but this merely illustrates the uncertainty of these epentheses; duguṇa in lieu of diuṇa is not older, but a variant mode of treating dviguṇa, and there is no special difficulty in holding that dāṇi and idāṇi are forms which