I am extremely reticent to join a discussion of metrics with specialists, but I might just dare to mention that in Buddhist texts the matter has been much discussed, especially in light of the clear tendency to transfer Middle Indic texts to Sanskrit, with the result that sometimes lines are entirely rewritten while at other times it would appear, as Roland says, that license is found. In a small paper on the so-called Kāśyapaparivarta's verses, I observed the following: " in the KP there are, in the roughly 600 lines amenable to examination, 31 cases in which the cluster pr does not make position, that is, in which a short vowel standing before the cluster pr must be read as metrically short..." I also tabulated the cases with other clusters.

The whole paper is available here: https://www.academia.edu/9535404/The_Nature_of_the_Verses_of_the_K%C4%81%C5%9Byapaparivarta

Very best, Jonathan

On Mon, Mar 30, 2020 at 6:51 PM Roland Steiner via INDOLOGY <indology@list.indology.info> wrote:

Please excuse the silly typo (now corrected).

> there are a few rare occurrences where we can apply the so-called *muta cum liquida* rule
> In Sanskrit such an indulgence is rather rare and appears to be more
> frequently applied in Prakrit poetry and "Epic" Sanskrit. In the latter
> case several types of consonant clusters do not cause the preceding
> syllable to be guru.

By the way, Colebrooke already described the phenomenon in 1808:

"By poetical license, a vowel may be short before certain conjuncts (viz., pra and hra; as also bra and kra. [...]."
(H. T. Colebrooke, "On Sanskrit and Prákrit Poetry", in: Miscellaneous Essays, Vol. 3, London 1873, p. 65)

In his PhD thesis of 1988 Michael Balk noted the same metrical license for the Udānavarga (especially for the case of pr- and br-). See M. Balk: Untersuchungen zum Udānavarga. Unter Berücksichtigung mittelindischer Parallelen und eines tibetischen Kommentars. Marburg 2011 (Indica et Tibetica. 53), pp. 39-42.

With best regards,
Roland Steiner

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