A Primer of Śaurasenī

Summary

The article "A Primer of Śaurasenī" is a translation of Richard Schmidt’s handbook on the Śaurasenī Prakrit, prepared by Pranabesh Sinha Ray. It serves as a concise grammar of the Śaurasenī dialect, one of the principal Prakrit languages used in Indian drama. The preface laments the absence of a simple manual for Śaurasenī and notes that existing works like Pischel’s Prakrit Grammar are too detailed for students. Schmidt outlines the sources used in compiling the handbook, listing seminal Prakrit grammars and studies (e.g., Bhāratīyanāṭyaśāstra, The Prākṛta-Prakāśa of Vararuci with commentary, Hemacandra’s Grammatik der Prākritsprachen, Cowell’s introduction to Sanskrit dramas, Pischel’s Grammatik der Prakrit-Sprachen). The manual compares Śaurasenī with related dialects Māhārāṣṭrī (the Prakrit of Maharashtra) and Māgadhī (the language of Magadha) and uses abbreviations M. for Māhārāṣṭrī, Mg. for Māgadhī and Ś. for Śaurasenī. Schmidt first discusses phonology: he explains vowel and consonant changes between Sanskrit and Prakrit, such as the conversion of Sanskrit ṛ to Śaurasenī i or ī; the change of ai to e; au to o; the nasalisation of consonants; and the behaviour of intervocalic y. He lists how the Śaurasenī vowels correspond to their Māhārāṣṭrī and Māgadhī equivalents and describes the treatment of diphthongs and long vowels, contractions (sandhi), and the loss of initial vowels. Subsequent sections describe declension patterns of stems ending in various vowels and consonants, such as stems in -r (agent nouns like bhattā “husband,” bhattā), stems in -at, -mat and -vat, stems in -o, -e and -au, and stems in -i. Schmidt provides paradigms for nominative, accusative, instrumental, dative, ablative, genitive and locative cases and notes where Śaurasenī diverges from Māhārāṣṭrī and Māgadhī. He also discusses pronouns, numerals, participles, gerunds, infinitives and denominative verbs, giving examples of forms and their derivations. Towards the end of the article, he explains the grammar rules only until the end of page 35; subsequent pages (36–43) provide specimen passages of Śaurasenī, Māhārāṣṭrī and Māgadhī texts for reading practice. These specimens are drawn from the Kāśikā, Karpūramañjarī and Śākuntalā. Throughout the primer, Schmidt emphasises that a basic understanding of Sanskrit helps in understanding Prakrit forms and that scholars must pay attention to dialectal markers to avoid conflating different Prakrit dialects.