1 অসমীয়া ব্যাকৰণ আৰু ভাষাতত্ত্ব and eastern or Magadhi Apabhrama. In later times Apabhramsa also came under some sort of grammatical rules as the elaborate rules in Siddha Hemcandra Ahyaya would show, ১. The Tertiary Prakrt | The Apabhramsas developed, in the course of time, as vernaculars into the Indo-Aryan languages of modern India. This may be regarded as the tertiary stage. MaxMiller arranges the modern vernaculars under the following groups :- | “The spoken languages of India which have been called Neo-Aryan, Neo-Sanskrit or Gaudian, seem to me to have a perfect right to t mon name of Prakrtic, which would at once distinguish them from the old Prakrts, and would at the same time indicate their real origin. They are not derived from Sanskrit but from the old Prakrts, or more truly still from the local Apabhramsas. “The living Prakrtic languages have now been arranged under four heads, as western, Northern, Southern and Eastern. “The Western class comprises Sindhi, Gujrati, Punjabi and Western Hindi ; “The Northern class comprises Garhwali, Kumaoni and Nepali ; “The Southern class comprises Marathi ; “The Eastern class comprises Bihari (or Eastern Hindi, Bengali, Uriya and Asami, | “The Northern and Western classes on one side, and the Southern and Eastern on the other, show certain traces of affinity. “All these languages and dialects must be considered as the descen- dants, not of grammatical Sanskrit, nor of the grammatical Prakrt, but of the various Apabhramsas, spoken in different parts of India, and reduced to some kind of grammatical order, partly by native school masters, partly by literary cultivation".. | with all deference to the great philologist it may be pointed out that Assamese, though classed as a member of the Magadhi group, still 1 MaxMuller-“Science of Language"--Vol. I, pp. 179-180.
