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!
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srkris
October 16, 2024, 11:47am
2
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:
On the question of Persian origins of the śākyas - I would tend to agree with the suggestion that they were probably Persian (and I have my own independent reasons for it), but that would not necessarily make the Buddha himself Persian - the Persian-origin people in India may have claimed him to be one of their own after his time.
The reasons that I have for regarding the śākyas as being Persian are as follows:
The endonym of the Achaemenids (i.e. the name they called themselves in the Old-P…
The Proto-Pali that you’ve described in the above 2 posts, is an imaginary language that appears to be arbitrarily assigned most of the characteristics that Classical Sanskrit (i.e. late-Vedic) had historically.
As i said in point 2 of this post there is no need to invent a parallel-origin theory for the underlying language of early buddhism (and this is exacly what you are trying to do). I therefore dont see the possibility of such a proto-pali being discovered or even philologically reconstr…
I wasn’t saying that the term/word Mleccha is a Persian term. I was saying that Mleccha means foreigners in general, and (in the time of the Buddha) the Persians in particular were the most prominent foreigners in Indo-Aryan India - particularly where their language is compared to Sanskrit and declared to be a bad (or poorly pronounced) variety of Sanskrit.
The fact that Asuras and Mlecchas are linked together (as in the Mleccha speech is primarily connected to or exemplified by the speech of …
I don’t agree with some of Stefan Karpik’s claims either that there was some kind of Oral-Transmission of EBTs in the first 3-4 centuries of Buddhism before they were finally written down. There is (in my knowledge of the facts) no evidence for any kind of early Oral-Transmission of the first 4 Nikayas of the Sutta Pitaka (in any language - Pali, Gandhari, or Sanskrit). Therefore the vast majority or entirety of the prose EBTs (excluding perhaps the verse suttas of the Atthakavagga, Parayanavag…
As far as I know, the only royals (khattiyas) who called themselves Saka, Sākya or Śākyas were the Achaemenids of Persia (the ruling dynasty of Persia during the lifetime of the Buddha) - the word 'Achaemenid is a Greek form of the Old-Persian word Haxāmanišyaʰ (which would have been pronounced in Sanskrit (a sister language having the same Indo-Iranian origin as Old-Persian and Avestan) as Sakāmanuṣyāḥ or Sakhā-manuṣyāḥ (“the Sakā peoples”) - which is close enough to be considered a variant na…
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Thanks @srkris you have given me much to chew on!