Historical Grammar of Apabhramsa

Apabhramsa forms the previous stage of modern Indo-Aryan languages like Hindi, Gujarati, Marathi, Bengali etc., its study is essential not only for its literature but also for the formation of modern Indian languages. The present volume is a chrono-regional study of nearly all the edited Apabhramsa texts available. The Apabhramsa texts were classified according to the place of their composition and the linguistic data was arranged in a chronological sequence and thus the space-time context of each forms was determined. After illuminating the term Apabhramsa and fixing its period and classifying the texts in their space-time context, the author offers a general conspectus of the phonological and morphological features of Apabhramsa in the Introduction. Then follow sections on Phonology, Declension, Conjugation, Nominal Stem-formation according to diachronic method connecting the evolved linguistic features to its modern descendant wherever possible. The work ends with an Index Verborum which lists all the words occurring in the study with their Sanskrit and Prakrit etymologies as well as references to their cognates in the modern Indo-Aryan. As Dr. Siddheshwar Varma says, "It is the history of Indo-Aryan between A.D. 500-1200".