{Sorry for the delay. This message had been automatically flagged as "spam", don't know why... Perhaps Yahoo-Group's robots think that "Kharosthi" is a brand of "Vi@..."? :-)
Regards. Seshat}



Kharosthi was pretty much out of use by the time Sanskrit came to be written with any sort of regularity, and Tocharian was usually written with Brahmi. A quick glance through Salomon 1999 shows only clusters with r and y, plus one kS.

Pali isn't Prakrit, and I believe it's much later than Kharosthi.

I wouldn't go by "the Unicode-related sources" for anything.
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...



----- Original Message ----
From: Richard Wordingham <richard@...>
To: qalam@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Wednesday, March 21, 2007 9:00:22 PM
Subject: Re: Kharoshthi CVC Orthographic Units (was:Theory of transliteration?)

--- In qalam@... com, "Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@. ..> wrote:

> If you will consult e.g. Masica, *The Indo-Aryan Languages*, you
will learn that Prakrits basically didn't have clusters, hence the
rarity of Kharaosthi conjuncts in general, and the nonexistence of CVC
syllables.

Well, I suppose you don't count the Gandhari Prakrit or Pali as
prakrits. I won't dispute the rarity of CVC (other than via gemimates
and homorganic nasals, whose ignoring can be justified), though,
possibly under Sanskrit influence, Pali certainly has them, e.g.
_tasma:_ therefore and initial vy-/by-. I lack data for Gandhari,
though I am aware of 'Gandhari metathesis' (CVCrV... > CrVCV...).

> Similarly, there was no need to mark words as final-vowelless, as
Prakrit words did not end with a consonant.

But Kharoshthi was also used for Sanskrit, and, though confirmation is
hard to come by, Tocharian B. Tocharian B had non-trivial CVC and
final consonants, though that may not be relevant.

There a collection of conjuncts in
http://www.andrewgl ass.org/download s/Glass_2000. pdf for anyone who
wants to go beyond the Unicode-related sources. The section header
'virama' actually refers to syllable-final consonants, though that
merely adds that the examples come from Niya, so presumably not
Tocharian. There's also a section arguing that anusvara is not
subscript <m>.

Richard.




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