EDGERTON, FRANKLIN : Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit Grammar and Dictionary (I: BHSG, II: BHSD); Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit Reader (BHSR). New Haven (Yale University Press)-London (Cumberledge, Oxford University Press). 1953. (In the William Dwight Whitney Linguistic Series.)

Abstract

Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit is the appellation used by Professor Franklin Edgerton to design the peculiar religious language employed in the Buddhist texts of Northern India that have become known to us during the last 125 years in manuscripts found chiefly in Nepal, Japan, and Chinese Turkestan. Indologists will know this very curious idiom by other names, such as Buddhist Sanskrit, Mixed Sanskrit, the Gatha-dialect. The last term, which was the first to be used, when the linguistic individuality of the idiom was realized, suggests the fact that scholars investigating the texts first believed that the verse portions (or some of them) were composed in another dialect than the prose parts, which were thought to be simply Sanskrit, rather poor Sanskrit most of it, and badly treated by scribal tradition. However, as early as 1882, when Senart published the first volume of his edition of the Mahavastu, one of the oldest texts, it was made generally known that also the prose portions of at least this text belonged to the Gatha-dialect, for which term Senart substituted the designation “Mixed Sanskrit”. In his widely read History of Indian Literature (Vol. I, 1905), Winternitz expressly states that an old Middle Indie dialect is employed in verse portions and also in large parts of the prose of this literature.