Age of the Nandas and Mauryas c12.s12.12

c12.s12.12

This roughly is the situation for the spoken dialects of Aryan India during the Nanda and Maurya periods. Aśoka employed them in his inscriptions as already the Eastern speech appears to have attained a certain literary position through the Buddhist and Jaina canons being redacted in it; and the use of the North-Western and South-Western speeches was just a concession to two distant and important dialects the speakers of which would find difficulty in following the Pāṭaliputra court speech. We know that the Greeks when they first came to India were confined to the area of the Udicya or North-Western dialect, a dialect which Aśoka's officials employed in the inscriptions at Mansehra and Shahbazgarhi. That this North-Western dialect retained some archaic or old Indo-Aryan characters is borne out not only by the evidence from the Brāhmaṇas and from the inscriptions of Aśoka, but also from the Greek transcriptions of Indian names heard from speakers of this dialect. Thus names like Sandrakottos, Sandraphagos, Prasioi, Eronnaboas, Brachmanes, Ottorakorrhas, Amitrokhatés or Amitrokhadés and Palibothra are Greek renderings of *Chandrakupta (a genuine North-Western form for Candragupta, with -k- for -g- characterising the Darada or Piśāca Prākṛit of the North-West), Candrabhāgā, Prācya, Hiraṇyavāha, Brāhmaṇa, Uttarakuru, Amitraghāta and *Pāllibutra for *Pad'liputra = Pāṭaliputra as heard in the north-west, where, as partially indicated by the Mansehra and Shahbazgarhi and later North-western inscriptions, groups like pr, tr, kr, br, dr, gr, did not assimilate the r.