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REVIEWS
61
Prakrta Bhāsā (In Hindi); A series of three lectures delivered under the
auspices of the Pārsvanātha Vidyāśrama at the Banaras Hindu University, by Prabodh Bechardas PANDIT. Banaras, 1954, pp. 58, Price Rs. 1-8-0.
The organisers of the Shri Pārsvanātha Vidyāśrama may be congratulated for having arranged a series of lectures on a topic connected with Jaina religion and Prāksta languages as one of their various academic undertakings. They certainly acted properly in securing the known linguist and Präkpta scholar of Gujarat, Dr. P. B. PANDIT, to deliver the first series of the lectures on the middle Indian dialects. The importance of a scientific study of these dialects now needs hardly any emphasis. For, without such a study, as the publisher observes in his introductory remarks, a proper linguistic assessment of the modern IndoAryan languages will not be possible.
In his first lecture the lecturer does well to give the historical background of the Prākstas by showing the relationship which Saṁskṛta, as the representative of the Old Indo-Aryan period, has with the other IndoEuropean languages. In the second lecture we get the description of the several middle Indian dialects in their geographical distribution. At one place the lecturer has rightly stressed the point that it is not proper to differentiate between languages if they differ from one another in only one or two phonetic features. The last lecture is devoted to narrate the
Madhu Vidyā/574
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