Bhatt/Info on Hemachandra/Tamil-Prakrit

[Michael Witzel]

here we go again.... where does all the following come from?

Yashwant Malaiya <malaiya at CS.COLOSTATE.EDU> 4/9/2000:
>Tamil/prakrit:
>
>it should be mentioned that
>Sanskrit too was a Prakrit,

???
Is Skt. hRdaya = Maharastri  hiaa??  And maybe I write Pidgin here?

Nogat, mi i-tokim na i-raitim Inglis (tok bilong bikpela soldia bilong balus).
Plis, stopim kranki toksave!

>specifically the language of NW
>India.

The "northern" language is known, even in the Vedic texts, as especially good.

>That is why the Buddhists in Gandhar used sanskrit (or
>a sanskrit-like) language instead of Pali.

Nope.  They used Gandhari, a Prakrit much further 'down the road' towards
New Indo-Aryan than Pali.

>This is just like
>khari boli being the standard dialect of Hindi today.

???

>Use of Sanskrit lingered on in NW India for quite some time, and
>was even used during the rule of some Muslim rulers as an
>official language.

No. Gandhari Prakrit was used first in inscriptions! See G. Fussman's long
paper  in C. Caillat, Dialectes dans les litteratures indiennes, Paris 1989

Sanskrit was only used *later on*. And then survived the even transition to
Islam in Kashmir in the 14th century by c. 100 years, when finally king
Zain ul Abidin, son of a Hindu mother and in general very friendly towards
the Kashmiri Hindus,  made Persian the official language at c. 1420 CE.

>The kafirs (culturally extinct now),

Nope. the Kalasha (in Pakistan) not yet, but the Afghani Kafirs, after the
Muslim conquest out of Kabul,  a hundred years ago...

>specially the Kalash, who
>were isolated in valleys,

they still are, in Chitral,  and their temples & figures & rituals survive,
in Pakistani Chitral...

> even now use words that are remarkably
>close to pure Sanskrit.

That is overdone... Kafiri (Nuristani) is not Sanskrit, just has some
conservative forms (such as gram for 'village'),  and:
since Nuristani is the third subfamily, next to Iranian and Indo-Aryan,
of Indo-Iranian, it differs from both and has preserved e.g. a sound (.c.
in du.c. '10') that is lost as early as in Vedic Skt. (daza) and Old
Iranian (dasa)...

> They have only recently given up their
>original faith for Islam (or Christianity in a few cases).

Nope, that's the Afghani Kafirs. Not the Kalasha  in Chitral.

>Their valleys are not too far away from Shalatur, where Panini lived.

==============
Michael Witzel
Department of Sanskrit & Indian Studies, Harvard University
2 Divinity Avenue, Cambridge MA 02138

ph. 617-496 2990 (also messages)
home page:     www.fas.harvard.edu/~witzel/mwpage.htm

Elect. Journ. of Vedic Studies:         www1.shore.net/~india/ejvs