From: aavuso@...
Message: 4882
Date: 2017-03-01
At some point the texts were written down, some probably already in the reign of Asoka. But the oral collections as a whole were put into writing somewhat later. At this point we are talking about a written language, which is an entirely different matter. At present we know of only one such language — the 'standard Epigraphic Prakrit' used for almost all inscriptions in the second century B.C. until the first century A.D. and continuing in use in some areas for a number of centuries. Pali is a somewhat developed and slightly Sanskritized form of that.
The language of the Hāthigumphā inscription, although it agrees with Pāli in the retention of most intervocalic consonants and in the nominative singular in -o, nevertheless differs in that the absolutive ending is -(t)tā, and with two doubtful exceptions there are no consonant groups containing -r-.While it is not impossible that there existed in India in the third century B. C. an unattested dialect of Middle Indo-Aryan which had all the features of Pāli, the fact that some of the consonant clusters found in Pali are unhistoric and must therefore represent incorrect attempts at backformation, e.g. disvā (which cannot be from dṛṣṭvā) and atraja (which cannot be from ātmaja), makes it more likely that by the third century B.C. the dialect of the canonical texts of the Theravādins conformed to the general pattern of Middle Indo-Aryan dialects of that time, and all consonant clusters had either been assimilated or resolved. It is probable that this represented the form of the language of the Theravādin canon at the time of the reign of Asoka, which was perhaps the lingua franca of the Buddhists of Eastern India, and not very different from the language of the Hāthigumpha inscriptions.