A Historical Grammar of Ardhamagadhi presents a concise and explicit account of the history and development of Amg. While preparing A Historical Grammar of Hindi, the present authors observed that there was no Historical Grammar of Amg. Amg is not only a non-secular language of Jainism, it is also the Middle Indo-Aryan stage of Envern Hindi. Thus the need for such a work was felt by the authors and it has finally taken the present shape.
The present work has three main parts Introduction, Phonology & Morphology.
The Introduction may prove to be quite useful, as it contains special features of Old Indo-Aryan, Middle Indo-Aryan, various stages of Middle Indo-Aryan and individual dialects of various stages of Middle Indo-Aryan, such as the Asokan dialects, Pali, Buddhistic Hybrid Sanskrit, Niya, Maharastri, Saurarent, Magadhi, Paisaci, Ardhamagadht, Amg poetry, Jaina Maha-rastri, Jaina Sauraseni.
Phonology contains quite a comprehensive and vivid picture of the history and origin of the sounds including both the normal and exceptional developments in a systematically classified and simplified manner. In Vowel Phonology, for example, the work presents the development of Skt vowels in Amg as well as it presents in the reverse order the sources of Skt vowels from Amg. Similarly, in Consonant Phonology it presents the treatment of Skt Initial, Medial & Final Simple Consonants in Amg, and the development of Sit Conjunct Consonants in Amg, as well as, it traces in the reverse order, the sources of Amg Consonants from Skt.
Noun Morphology includes the history of Amg case-endings and history of various declensional stems. History of various pronominal declensions, Cardinal & Ordinal Numerals etc. are presented quite systematically in the following chapters on morphology. The verb morphology includes history of personal endings, history of present, preterite & future formations etc. The work finally presents the history of participles, gerunds and infinitives. In addition, there is a full-fledged Word-Index to augment the utility of the work.
The present work has its own style of exposition. The examples of Skt, Amg etc,, when obvious, are left unstamped. The glide has been systematically printed y instead of j, as some would prefer. The symbol + has been used in this book to express a combination of two consonants. For example means kr as wellasrk. But when specified as preceding the combination means only Ar.
The authors are grateful to all the former path-makers, specially to Pischel for the bulk of material of MIA including Amg and to Sen for the wealth of historical details of MIA. It is a fact that sometimes the authors have differed in explanations from the path-makers but still they feel indebted to them.
The authors are thankful to Sri Rajendra Tiwari, proprietor Ashutosh Prakashan Sansthan, who took special interest in the publication of this work.
30th January, 1982 Varanasi (Vasenia Paican)
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