"Doing Linguistics Through Philology: Reconstructing the Gandhari (Northwest Prakrit) Language"

Abstract:

Gandhari, a northwestern dialect of the Middle Indo-Aryan family, was until recently known primarily from inscriptional and numismatic texts, but in the last few years a large corpus of Gandhari manuscripts containing Buddhist literary texts has become available. These manuscripts present copious new data on the many problems of the Gandhari language, especially its phonology, while also raising many new questions. The presentation will focus on the theoretical and practical problems of identifying the linguistic and dialectal realities underlying texts written in a problematic script (Kharosthi) with a highly unstandardized orthography, which present us with a language that is very much "in the rough."