Re: By-/vy alternation in hinter-India

Ven. Nyanatusita:

>I had a look at Geiger again and he states (para 53.3) that initially
>only `v' appears. I assumed earlier that the medial v/b alternation
>could also take place initially but maybe this is not the case.
>Geiger (para 54.6) also states that the by- form is written for vy- in
>manuscripts from hinter-India. I suppose that he means Burma with
>hinter-India, but am not sure.

O. v. Hinueber (Ueberblick §255) gives initial vy- as Sinhalese and
initial by- as South-east Asian. That is also my impression.

>  However, I see no clear correlation
>between the origin of the Patimokkha MSS and editions I have and the
>initial by-/vy- alternation.

That is interesting. Can you elaborate ? Obviously since the 18th
century (at least) there has been introduction of S.E. Asian Mss to
Sri Lanka which has influenced Pali orthography. Also some recent
Thai editions at least seem to be influenced by PTS which often
follows the Sinhalese (?) tradition on this. I think the Burmese
printed editions at least use almost exclusively initial by-. Do you
have any Burmese Mss which use vy- ?

>Norman (``Dialect form in Paali'') notes an initial v/bh alternation in
>Middle Indo-aryan and states that it is dialectical. I could not find
>anything in his writings about an initial vy-/by- alternation.

He does however point out (e.g. EV II Introduction §74d) that initial
vy-/by- does not make position in verse. This might imply an earlier
form of writing Pali with initial v-/b- for such cases. There are a
number of very early Ms and inscriptional cases where we have -vv- in
place of the expected form -bb-.

>Initial by- is not found in the Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit
>Dictionary, however the MW Sanskrit English Dictionary gives byu.s (as
>well as pyu.s) as a reading for vyu.s (in the sense of `dividing'.)

We should note that in some Indic scribal traditions 'v' and 'b' were
not distinguished. This means that for some BHS texts we do not know
for certain whether vy- or by- was written. It is not improbable that
there were South Asian scribal traditions for Pali too in which 'v'
and 'b' were not distinguished. If so, we might expect copying of Mss
backwards and forwards between traditions which differed on this
point to have sometimes introduced minor confusion.

Lance Cousins