The Formation of the Marathi Language

Undoubtedly the religious prestige of Buddhism and the political prestige already going back to several generations of the Mauryan Dynasty had enabled the language of the Magadha to extend itself over the entire North of India atleast among the cultured sections of the population and in so far as a part of I he vocabulary was concerned (ef. [...] In the eastern group there is no cerebral n nor a palatal n the initial y is elided 1 replaces r the masculine nominative and ordinarily the neuter is in -e the locative in -asi; the other [group] distinguishes the cerebral n from the palatal -ii prserves the initial y and r has the nominative singular of maculines in -a the locative in -amhi or in -e" (Senart op. [...] Some of these forms are probably mistakes : but nothing permits us to find out the reason for the distribution of ch and kh or of the genitive in -iyd and in -iye; the origin of the donors clarifies nothing: in the inscriptions due to the donors from Besnagar and Nandinagar as in those of the donors from Ujjain the two terminations arc found (however at Kurara-Kuraghara one does not come across [...] To follow the isolated words in their development and in their migration is in fact a task possible only in those countries where the general history of language being known the study of the minute details of philosophy and dialectology enable us to rigorously delimit the area of use and the epoch of the vitality of different words or of their different forms. [...] On the other side the formation of the oblique on the old genitive of Sanskrit in the singular number as in the plural one is found only in the Himalayan North-West and in the Romany language.