Prakrit! Hooray for Prakrit!

Just wanted to call attention to the excellent works of

http://prakrit.info/

Andrew has a bunch of amazing resources on his site including;

http://prakrit.info/prakrit/

and

http://prakrit.info/dh/index.html

As well as an excellent collection of texts on github:

Including many of the Jain agamas which is what led me too him in the first place.

Add him to your list of resources Prakrit fans!

7 Likes

Thanks, he is a good scholar.

In this paper, which I think is well worth reading at least once ( Final Syllable Reduction in Middle Indic and Iranic ), he mentions:

Bailey noted that many words that are peculiar to Buddhist Sanskrit, and hence discussed in Edgerton’s Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit Dictionary , are loanwords, “which have been, as it would seem, introduced by the Iranian-speaking ‘Indo-Scythians’ of northwestern India in the period from the second century B.C. to the fourth century A.D.” (1955, 14); some of these words will be discussed below.

I think this is a very significant statement (as a lot of those unique BHS vocabulary not usually found in Standard Sanskrit, are also attested in Canonical Pali and Gandhari).

I’ve also referred to Iranic influences in the EBTs in some of my responses here, for example:

1 Like

Thanks @srkris you have given me much to chew on!