Eastern and Western Manuscripts of the Prakrita-paingala
By S. N. Ghosal
Summary
This linguistic note by S. N. Ghoshal compares two families of manuscripts of the **Prākṛita‑paingala**, a treatise on prosody and phonetics. The Western group, written in Devanāgarī script and preserved in Poona and Calcutta, retains aspirated consonants in conjuncts and often doubles aspirates. In contrast, the Eastern group, written in Bengali and Odia scripts, exhibits de‑aspiration and elides intervocalic aspirates. Ghoshal catalogues hundreds of forms illustrating these differences and argues that they reflect scribal conventions rather than spoken pronunciation. He notes that some double aspirates may be orthographic markers borrowed from Prakrit grammarians and cautions against reading them as evidence of phonetic change. The article also observes that the Bengali manuscripts occasionally insert an extra vowel or drop nasals, indicating a tendency toward simplification. By tracing manuscript provenance and palaeography, Ghoshal suggests that the Devanāgarī recensions were copied in western India in the 14th–15th centuries, while the Bengali group may derive from a lost eastern archetype. His analysis thus sheds light on regional scribal practices and the transmission of Sanskrit texts. The study ends with the observation that linguistic features once considered dialectal may owe more to copyists than to speakers.
AI-generated summary, automatically checked against the article text.
Conclusion
Ghoshal’s meticulous comparison demonstrates that manuscript evidence must be interpreted cautiously. Orthographic peculiarities such as doubled aspirates or de‑aspiration do not necessarily indicate phonetic differences but may reflect scribes’ attempts to normalise or simplify. Recognising these patterns helps scholars reconstruct textual histories and avoids drawing unwarranted conclusions about regional speech from written sources.