GandhÃÂrë was an Indo-Aryan Prakrit language found mainly in texts dated between the 3rd century BCE and 4th century CE in the region of GandhÃÂra, located in the northwestern Indian subcontinent. The language was heavily used by the former Buddhist cultures of Central Asia and has been found as far away as eastern China, in inscriptions at Luoyang and Anyang.
Gandhari served as an official language of the Kushan Empire and various central Asian kingdoms, including Khotan and Shanshan. It appears on coins, inscriptions and texts, notably the GandhÃÂran Buddhist texts. It is notable among the Prakrits for having some archaic phonology, for its relative isolation and independence, for being partially within the influence of the ancient Near East and Mediterranean and for its use of the Kharoá¹£á¹Âhë script, compared to Brahmic scripts used by other Prakrits.
GandhÃÂrë is an early Middle Indo-Aryan language â a Prakrit â with unique features that distinguish it from all other known Prakrits. Phonetically, it maintained all three Old Indo-Aryan sibilants (s, à Â, and á¹£) as distinct sounds, whereas they fell together as [s] in other Prakrits â a change that is considered to be one of the earliest Middle Indo-Aryan shifts. The language also preserves certain Old Indo-Aryan consonant clusters, mostly those involving v and r. In addition, intervocalic Old Indo-Aryan th and dh are written, early on, with a special letter (represented by scholars with an underlined s: [<u>s</u>]), which is later used interchangeably with s â suggesting an early sound-change, likely to the voiced dental fricative ð, and then subsequent shifts to z and, finally, a plain s. GandhÃÂrë has been linked with members of the modern Dardic language family, including Shina and Torwali.
The Middle Prakrits typically weakened th to dh, which later shifted to h. Kharoá¹£á¹Âhë does not render the distinction between short and long vowels, so details regarding its handling of this feature are not known.
Initial identification of a distinct language occurred through study of one of the Buddhist ÃÂgamas, the DërghÃÂgama, which had been translated into Chinese by Buddhayaà Âas () and Zhu Fonian ().
Since this time, a consensus has grown in scholarship which sees the first wave of Buddhist missionary work as associated with GandhÃÂrë and the Kharoá¹£á¹Âhë script, and tentatively with the Dharmaguptaka sect.
Available evidence also indicates that the first Buddhist missions to Khotan were carried out by the Dharmaguptaka sect, and used a Kharoá¹£á¹Âhë-written GandhÃÂrë. However, there is evidence that other sects and traditions of Buddhism also used GandhÃÂrë, and evidence that the Dharmaguptaka sect also used Sanskrit at times.
Starting in the first century of the common era, there was a large trend toward a type of GandhÃÂrë which was heavily Sanskritised.
Linguistic evidence links some groups of the Dardic languages with Gandhari. The Kohistani languages, now all being displaced from their original homelands, were once more widespread in the region and most likely descend from the ancient dialects of the region of Gandhara. The last to disappear was Tirahi, still spoken some years ago in a few villages in the vicinity of Jalalabad in eastern Afghanistan, by descendants of migrants expelled from Tirah by the Afridi Pashtuns in the 19th century. Georg Morgenstierne claimed that Tirahi is "probably the remnant of a dialect group extending from Tirah through the Peshawar district into Swat and Dir." Nowadays, it must be entirely extinct and the region is now dominated by Iranian languages brought in by later immigrations, such as Pashto. Among the modern-day Indo-Aryan languages still spoken today, Torwali, another language within the Dardic subgroup, shows the closest linguistic affinity possible to Niya Prakrit, a dialect of GandhÃÂrë once spoken in Niya (now Xinjiang, China).
In general terms, GandhÃÂrë is a Middle Prakrit, a term for middle-stage Middle Indo-Aryan languages. It only begins to show the characteristics of the Late Prakrits in the 1st century of the Common Era. The Middle Prakrit phonetic features are the weakening of intervocalic consonants: degemination and voicing, such as the shift of OIA *k to g. The most rapid loss was the dentals, which started to disappear completely even before the late period as with *t > â as in *pitar > piu; in contrast, retroflex consonants were never lost. There is also evidence of the loss of a distinction between aspirates and plain stops as well, which is unusual in the Indo-Aryan languages.
In Central Asian GandhÃÂrë, there is often confusion in writing nasals with homorganic stops; it is unclear if this might represent assimilation of the stop or the appearance of prenasalised consonants to the phonetic inventory.
GandhÃÂrë grammar is difficult to analyse; endings were eroded not only by the loss of final consonants and cluster simplification of all Prakrits but also by the apparent weakening of final vowels "'to the point that they were no longer differentiated'". Nonetheless, there was still at least a rudimentary system of grammatical case. Verbal forms are highly restricted in usage due to the primary usage of longer texts to translations of religious documents and the narrative nature of the sutras but seem to parallel changes in other Prakrits.
The lexicon of GandhÃÂrë is also limited by its textual usage; it is still possible to determine unusual forms, such as GandhÃÂrë forms that show commonalities with forms in modern Indo-Aryan languages of the area, notably some groups of the Dardic languages. An example is the word for sister, which is a descendant of Old Indo-Aryan svasá¹Â- as in the Dardic languages, whereas all the Indo-Aryan languages have replaced that term with reflexes of bhaginë.
Until 1994, the only GÃÂndhÃÂri manuscript available to the scholars was a birch bark manuscript of a Buddhist text, the DharmapÃÂda, discovered at KohmÃÂri MazÃÂr near Hotan in Xinjiang in 1893 CE. From 1994 on, a large number of fragmentary manuscripts of Buddhist texts, seventy-seven altogether, were discovered in eastern Afghanistan and western Pakistan. These include:
Mahayana Buddhist Pure Land Sà «tras were brought from GandhÃÂra to China as early as 147 CE, when the Kushan monk Lokaká¹£ema began translating the first Buddhist sutras into Chinese. The earliest of these translations show evidence of having been translated from GandhÃÂrë. It is also known that manuscripts in the Kharoá¹£á¹Âhë script existed in China during this period.