1883.] G. A. Grierson —Essays on Bihari Declension. 135 
form, and I refer it to the well known tendency of Prakrit to reduce all 
nouns to one common declension, which is carried further by Ap. Pr. and 
the modern Vernaculars, than we find in the classical Prakrit of Vararuchi. 
By a similar process I would account for the instrumental forms of 
bases with other vocalic endings. 
E. This is the most universally distributed of all the case ter¬ 
minations. It occurs in all the Bihari dialects, and in the Ramayan. It 
appears in all the Prakrit dialects from the classical of Vararuchi to the 
Apabhramsa; and, to take examples of cognate modern languages it is 
found in Bangali, and in all the local dialects of Hindi. It also occurs in 
Sanskrit as the locative of nouns whose bases end in In the modern 
languages, too, it is only used with nouns ending in a final (silent) 
Thus we have STS' ‘ on a landing place,’ from WTS, 3TT^ 4 in a village, from 
aiTH, but no corresponding forms for words like 3TSJT, or Similarly 
also in Bangali ‘ a boy,’ makes but the locative of sfhft 
‘ a mare,’ is quite a different form, It is the same in classical 
Prakrit, Arsha, and Pali; in all these y is only used as the termination of 
the locative of ^ bases. We thus get the following table : 
Sanskrit. 
Pali. 
Arsha. 
Prakrit. 
Bihari. 
Bangali. 
^ base 
tt 
tt 
tt 
but 
base 
JiJTT«f 
JTJrre 
JTJTT H 
JTJITSJ 
?; base 
^TfjT 
^3 base 
31 ^ 
JT^^. 
vJ 
vJ 
J 
From the above it is evident that the locative termination y is used 
throughout all these languages only with bases in ^Ef. Feminine bases in 
are no exception to this rule, for the termination y in Arsha and Pra¬ 
krit is of entirely different origin. In Apabhramsa Prakrit there are two 
forms of the locative one in y (fTW), and one a weakened form in (?rf%), 
both of which are used only with bases in The latter it appears to me 
not unreasonable to consider to be a weakened form of the former. 
