Dear Jacob,
likewise familiar with this orthographical phenomenon in Sanskrit Mss,
my guess is that,
although the scribes were necessarily influenced by the vernaculars,
and probably the more the less educated they were
– the phenomenon as such being long since known (as censurable),
as Stefan Baums and others perceptively pointed out – ,
the fact that its occurrence remains sporadically and rather associated with
specific scribes/Mss (say, rather than ever gaining broader general acceptance
and application) would nevertheless in principle support Dominik’s point
(given he may have exactly implied the scribes in their social context),
when he characterized this (in Skt. texts impertinent) orthographic feature
as “scribal carelessness”.
Fortsat god arbejdlyst,
Hartmut Buescher