alteralteralterphoric pppppppast passive participle emphemphemphatic particle
$*$$*$footnotetext: Equal contribution.

# For the Purpose of Curry: A UD Treebank for Ashokan Prakrit

Adam Farris*
San Mateo High School
<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
&Aryaman Arora*
Georgetown University
<EMAIL_ADDRESS>

###### Abstract

We present the first linguistically annotated treebank of Ashokan Prakrit, an
early Middle Indo-Aryan dialect continuum attested through Emperor Ashoka
Maurya’s 3rd century BCE rock and pillar edicts. For annotation, we used the
multilingual Universal Dependencies (UD) formalism, following recent UD work
on Sanskrit and other Indo-Aryan languages. We touch on some interesting
linguistic features that posed issues in annotation: regnal names and other
nominal compounds, “proto-ergative” participial constructions, and possible
grammaticalizations evidenced by sandhi (phonological assimilation across
morpheme boundaries).00footnotetext: The example of sūpātʰāya ‘for the purpose
of curry’ (discussed further in section 5.3) inspired the title of this paper.
Glossing abbreviations:

## Glossary

Eventually, we plan for a complete annotation of all attested Ashokan texts,
towards the larger goals of improving UD coverage of different diachronic
stages of Indo-Aryan and studying language change in Indo-Aryan using
computational methods.

##  1 Introduction

Ashokan Prakrit is the earliest attested stage and among the most conservative
known forms of Middle Indo-Aryan (MIA), represented by inscriptions in the
form of rock and pillar edicts commissioned by the Mauryan emperor Ashoka
(aśōka111Throughout this work, we use a newly devised transliteration scheme,
devised by Samopriya Basu, based on the International Alphabet of Sanskrit
Transliteration (IAST) which is standard in Indological work, as well as
influences from the IPA and Americanist systems. Divergences from IAST are: 1.
indication of aspiration and breathy voice with superscript
$\langle$ʰ$\rangle$, 2. explicit marking of $\langle$ē$\rangle$ and
$\langle$ō$\rangle$ as long vowels, 3. overdot for visarga $\langle$ḣ$\rangle$
and anusvara $\langle$ṁ$\rangle$, instead of the underdot, to avoid confusion
with retroflexion.) in the 3rd century BCE. The Indo-Aryan languages are the
predominant language family in the northern (and insular southern) parts of
the Indian subcontinent, and consitute a branch of the widespread Indo-
European family. They are generally divided into three historical stages: Old
Indo-Aryan (OIA; Sanskrit, both the language of Vedic and of later Classical
texts, as well as unattested varieties suggested by dialectal variation in
later stages), Middle Indo-Aryan (MIA; Ashokan Prakrit, Pali, the Dramatic
Prakrits, and early koinés of the Hindi Belt), and New Indo-Aryan (NIA; modern
Indo-Aryan languages such as Hindi–Urdu, Assamese, Marathi, Dhivehi, Kashmiri,
Khowar, etc.).

Diachronically, Ashokan Prakrit is a descendant of Old Indo-Aryan varieties
(some of which are attested through Vedic and Classical Sanskrit) and is a
precursor to regional fragmentation of Middle Indo-Aryan into Pali, the
Dramatic Prakrits, and eventually the NIA languages. Ashokan Prakrit is a
dialect continuum rather than a standardized language, but the three dialect
zones are not divergent enough to prove mutually unintelligible [Oberlies,
2003].

Universal Dependencies [Nivre et al., 2016, de Marneffe et al., 2021] is a
multilingual formalism for treebanking, including annotation guidelines for
dependency relations, morphological analysis, part-of-speech tagging, and
other linguistic features. Several New Indo-Aryan languages [Bhatt et al.,
2009, Tandon et al., 2016, Ravishankar, 2017] and Sanskrit [Kulkarni et al.,
2020, Hellwig et al., 2020, Dwivedi and Zeman, 2017] have treebanks annotated
using UD or other syntactic formalisms, but thus far there is no treebank for
a MIA language, leaving a gap in Indo-Aryan historical corpora. Within MIA,
Ashokan Prakrit has an unusual corpus of parallel texts representing multiple
geographical dialects, conducive to the study of Indo-Aryan linguistic
fragmentation using computational tools.

To this end, we began UD annotation of a digitized Ashokan Prakrit corpus
under the Digitizing Imperial Prakrit Inscriptions (DIPI)222From Shahbazgarhi,
Mansehra dipi ‘rescript, writing’, as opposed to the lateralized variant lipi
attested in other dialects. project. We will present some interesting
annotation issues that arose, both in the context of Indo-Aryan comparative
linguistics and for the Universal Dependencies annotation scheme, and suggest
future directions for historical and dialectological corpus linguistic work in
the Indo-Aryan family.

##  2 Related work

Figure 1: Locations of the various Ashokan inscriptions and edicts in the
Indian Subcontinent, coloured by their usual geographic grouping (not by
linguistic isoglosses). Points in grey in the northwest are inscriptions that
are not in Ashokan Prakrit (instead, Aramaic and Greek).

The first Ashokan edicts were deciphered by James Prinsep in the 1830s [Kopf,
1969]. Since then, they have played an important role in the historical study
of Ashoka and the Mauryan Empire, sociological and religious study on early
Buddhism and other heterodox Dharmic sects [Smith et al., 2016, Scott, 1985],
and, of course, linguistic work from a historical and social perspective.
Figure 1 shows the locations of the known Ashokan inscriptions, with labels on
the locations particularly relevant to this paper.

There are several works which attempt a broad comparative study of the
inscriptions with reference to Sanskrit [Woolner, 1924, Hultzsch, 1925,
Mehendale, 1948, Bloch, 1950, Sen, 1956, Oberlies, 2003]. Like most historical
linguistic work on IA, these works focus mostly on phonology and, to a lesser
extent, morphology to the detriment of syntax and semantics [Varma, 1947].

On the computational side, the only digitized and machine-readable version of
the Ashokan edicts is the Ashoka Library [Braarvig et al., 2014], which is
sourced from ?) and thus missing more recently discovered inscriptions.

Other UD corpora and their annotation guidelines were also helpful to our own
annotation process, e.g. ?). Hand-prepared Ashokan Prakrit inflectional tables
based on data harvested from ?) were of use, in addition to Sanskrit
dictionaries [Monier-Williams, 1899, Sircar, 1966] and morphological analysers
[Huet, 2005].333The Sanskrit Grammarian [Huet, 2005] has a web interface at
https://sanskrit.inria.fr/DICO/grammar.html.

##  3 Corpus

[column sep=0.6cm] bahukaṁ & hi & dōsaṁ & samājamhi & pasati & dēvānaṁ & priyō
& priya & dasi & rājā
DET & PART & NOUN & NOUN & VERB & NOUN & ADJ & ADJ & ADJ & NOUN
5root [edge unit distance=2.2ex]510nsubj 109nmod:desc 98amod [edge unit
distance=2.3ex]107nmod:desc 76nmod 54obl 53obj 31det 52discourse [column
sep=0.6cm] bahukaṁ & hi & dōsaṁ & samājasa & drakhati & dēvānaṁ & piyē & piya
& dasī & lājā
DET & PART & NOUN & NOUN & VERB & NOUN & ADJ & ADJ & ADJ & NOUN
5root [edge unit distance=2.2ex]510nsubj 109nmod:desc 98amod [edge unit
distance=2.3ex]107nmod:desc 76nmod 54obl 53obj 31det 52discourse

Figure 2: Dependency parse of the fourth sentence of Major Rock Edict 1 as
found in two locations. The top is from Girnar, representing the Western
dialect, and the bottom is from Jaugada, representing the Eastern dialect.

The Ashokan Prakrit texts available to us constitute a very limited corpus.
They are royal inscriptions concerning the promotion of Buddhist morality,
administration of the Mauryan Empire, and records of Ashoka’s magnanimous
deeds (such as his conversion to Buddhism). They directly address the public,
and all evidence points to Ashokan Prakrit being a semi-standardized but still
fairly accurate reflection of vernacular language, given the geographical
dialect variation and communicative purpose of the texts.

We began with transcribed edicts from the Ashoka Library [Braarvig et al.,
2014]. Annotation began in June 2021 and was done in Google Sheets
simultaneously by two linguistically-informed annotators with discussions to
resolve disagreements. Although Google Sheets is not the conventional choice
of tool for such a project, existing UD annotation tools were found to be
lacking a convenient means of editing FEATS columns in a conllu file, as well
as supplying additional columns (e.g. etymologies). Additionally, this allowed
us to avoid setting up the server required for collaborative annotation with
tools like UD Annotatrix [Tyers et al., 2017] A guidelines document was added
to as the analysis of tricky constructions was decided upon.

Given the parallel nature of the corpus, annotations for a particular edict at
one location could be transferred with little modification to that of another
location. An example of this is given in figure 2, which only shows POS-tag
and dependency parse UD annotations of a parallel sentence, glossed below.

  * (1)

rājā dasi Priya- priyō Dēvānaṁ- pasati samājamhi dōsaṁ hi bahukaṁ king:..
looking:.. kindly beloved:.. god:.. see:... meeting:.. evil:.. very

‘King Beloved-of-the-Gods Looking-Kindly sees much evil in festival meetings.’
(Girnar 1:4) Thus, we used the well-preserved edicts at Girnar as the main
annotation document, and annotated other editions only after finalising the
corresponding Girnar version. Table 1(a) gives statistics about the annotated
corpus.

##  4 Annotation and analysis

| Doc. | Sent. | Tok.
---|---|---|---
Girnar | 5 | 43 | 534
Shahbazgarhi | 3 | 14 | 158
Mansehra | 1 | 8 | 87
Kalsi | 1 | 8 | 85
Jaugada | 1 | 8 | 89
Dhauli | 1 | 3 | 20
Total | 12 | 84 | 973
(a) DIPI corpus composition, grouped by source location of the annotated
inscriptions.

Feature | Measure | Val.
---|---|---
UPOS | Cohen’s $\kappa$ | 0.949
HEAD | UAS | 0.857
DEPREL | Label score | 0.776
HEAD+DEPREL | LAS | 0.673
(b) Agreement scores between two annotators on Girnar Major Rock Edict 7.

Table 1: Metrics about the DIPI corpus.

We annotated using the standard Universal POS tag inventory and Universal
Dependency Relations from Universal Dependencies v2, with some additional
dependency subtypes: acl:relcl, advmod:lmod, advmod:tmod, advmod:neg,
nmod:desc (discussed in section 5.1.1), obl:lmod, obl:tmod. Overall UPOS
counts are given in table 2.

Most of the corpus was annotated collaboratively with continuous revisions to
maximize annotation quality given the lack of reliable modern grammars and
lexicons for Ashokan Prakrit. Major Rock Edict 7 at Girnar (5 sentences, 49
tokens) was annotated by both authors independently to compute interannotator
agreement figures. Agreement scores are reported in table 1(b). Agreement on
universal POS tagging and head attachment is high. Low labelled attachment
score (LAS) reflects the difficulty in analysing the sometimes fragmentary
language of the corpus, as is expected in treebanking ancient language corpora
[David et al., 2009].

The most common (and thus likely pragmatically unmarked word order, modulo the
inscriptional nature of the corpus) in Ashokan Prakrit is subject–object–verb,
occuring in half of 24 verbs in the corpus with nsubj and obj dependents,
followed by object–subject–verb with 8 occurrences. SOV is the unmarked word
order in most New Indo-Aryan languages as well.

UPOS | Count | %
---|---|---
NOUN | 345 | 35.5%
ADJ | 136 | 14.0%
VERB | 106 | 10.9%
ADV | 83 | 8.5%
CCONJ | 78 | 8.0%
PRON | 47 | 4.8%
PART | 42 | 4.3%

UPOS | Count | %
---|---|---
DET | 42 | 4.3%
NUM | 35 | 3.6%
PROPN | 22 | 2.3%
X | 14 | 1.4%
SCONJ | 11 | 1.1%
ADP | 10 | 1.0%
_ | 2 | 0.2%

Table 2: Top UPOS categories. PUNCT, SYM, and INTJ were not used.

##  5 Annotation issues

Some of the interesting annotation issues faced include: the POS-tagging and
dependency parsing of regnal names in Ashokan Prakrit and cross-lingually
(with further discussion on compounds in general), the in-progress transition
to split ergativity and its morphological and syntactic analysis within the
framework of UD, as well as the relationship between irregular sandhi and the
grammaticalization of nouns into adpositions.

A recurring point in the analysis of these issues is that Ashokan Prakrit is
transitional between Sanskrit and New Indo-Aryan, still in the process of
undergoing many drastic syntactic (from non-configurational to
configurational) and morphological (from synthetic to analytic) changes. Given
the small size of the corpus and inability to elicit information from native
speakers, we faced difficulties annotating features based on a synchronic
analysis without looking towards better, and often conflicting, data from
Sanskrit or NIA languages.

###  5.1 Regnal names

A puzzling issue in annotation was Ashoka’s regnal names, such as:

  * (2)

rājā dasi Priya- priyō Dēvānaṁ- pasati samājamhi dōsaṁ hi bahukaṁ king:..
looking:.. kindly beloved:.. god:.. see:... meeting:.. evil:.. very rāña
dasinā Priya- priyēna Dēvānaṁ- king:.. looking:.. kindly beloved:.. god:..

‘King Beloved-of-the-Gods Looking-Kindly’ (Girnar 1:1) Ashokan Prakrit, like
Sanskrit, often constructs chains of nominals and adjectives headed by the
last member and with all the members agreeing in case and number with it—here,
the instrumental singular. Tokenization, POS-tagging of morphemes in
compounds, and dependency relations in regnal names all came up as issues in
UD annotation. The decisions in this section were arrived at after much
discussion with the UD community.444Documented in a GitHub issue:
https://github.com/UniversalDependencies/docs/issues/802.

####  5.1.1 POS annotation of morphemes in compounds

The first issue was how to POS tag the morphemes in such compounds. In Ashokan
Prakrit, like in Sanskrit, “the division-line between substantive and
adjective … [is] wavering” [Whitney, 1889] so any of these titles could be
thought of as nominals (‘one who is beloved of the Gods’) or adjectives
(‘beloved by the Gods’). Furthermore, syntactic context can blur the
distinction; an adjective like dasin ‘looking’ can be nominalized into
‘looker’, and a noun in a compound may behave attributively.

Initially, we thought to label all the morphemes in the regnal names as PROPN
given that they refer to a person like a regular name does. However, these
morphemes have internal dependency structure, most obviously the genitive-case
modifier in dēvānaṁ-priyēna. The PROPN label would obscure what is clearly a
genitive-case NOUN, dēvānaṁ ‘of the Gods’, that does not refer to a specific
individual or entity like a name does.

In regards to differentiating between NOUN and ADJ in Ashokan Prakrit, we
settled on the criterion that something with a fixed inherent gender must be
NOUN, and anything with fluid gender assignment is ADJ. This makes the POS tag
a lexical feature rather than one that is contextually assigned by syntactic
properties, which would render it redundant. UD precedent in other languages,
e.g. Latin, favours the annotation of dependency structure in proper nouns and
the regular POS tagging of nominalized components in such
names.555https://github.com/UniversalDependencies/docs/issues/777

####  5.1.2 Dependency structure of nominalized titles

[column sep=0.5cm] dēvānaṁ & priyēna & priya & dasinā & rāña
NOUN & ADJ & ADJ & ADJ & NOUN
2root 24flat 43amod 25flat 21nmod

(a) flat

[column sep=0.5cm] dēvānaṁ & priyēna & priya & dasinā & rāña
NOUN & ADJ & ADJ & ADJ & NOUN
5root 54? 43amod 52? 21nmod

(b) any headed dependency

Figure 3: Potential dependency parses (headless and headed) of Ashoka’s regnal
names.

There is substantial disagreement among UD corpora on the dependency
annotation of regnal names, epithets, and other appellative titles. The
current UD guidelines prefer the flat relation for “exocentric (headless)
semi-fixed MWEs [multi-word expressions] like names and dates”. The head is
arbitrarily assigned to be the first nominal in the multi-word expression.
This is unacceptable for titles in Ashokan Prakrit, since want to treat this
the same way as adjective–noun NPs, with the head always being the last word.
?) recently attempted to resolve this issue for a wide range of nominal
constructions in English (including Mr. and Secretary of State, which are
similar to Ashokan Prakrit titles), and we build upon that analysis here.

Since we have established that in Ashokan Prakrit such constructions are not
headless, we have to decide which headed dependency relation should be used
instead. We considered appos, compound, and nmod:desc, and amod if we chose to
analyse the appellatives as adjectival rather than nominal. The difference
between a headed and headless dependency analysis of the regnal titles is
shown in figure 3.

The issues, resolved once we came to nmod after settling our POS tagging, in
the other relations are:

  * •

appos: Generally, an appositive is a full NP that can be paraphrased with an
equational copula in a relative clause, e.g. Bob, my friend implies Bob, who
is my friend. But in Ashokan Prakrit, given the blurring between nouns and
adjectives, it is clear that each title NP is directly modifying the NP rāña
‘king’ rather than paraphrasing an appositional relationship.

  * •

compound: Like flat, this indicates a multiword expression forming a single NP
rather than relationships between full NPs. Each regnal name is, however, a
whole NP that could stand alone.

  * •

amod: Our reasoning against the other two relies on analysing each title as an
NP. The fact that titles can be dropped, and that rāña ‘king’ can be dropped
while retaining grammaticality, supports the assumption that each title is
indeed an NP since any one could be the head if phrase-final. Thus, an
adjectival relation like amod is not preferred.

Realising that the head of each NP title is lexically a nominalized ADJ, we
settled on nmod:desc as the best dependency relation. Further evidence comes
from variation in the components of the titles in different editions of the
edicts, e.g. (3) and (4). Given that (4) drops ‘king’ entirely and can have
the titles stand alone without another NP head, we are certain that each title
is an NP.

  * (3)

rājā dasi Priya- priyō Dēvānaṁ- pasati samājamhi dōsaṁ hi bahukaṁ king:..
looking:.. kindly beloved:.. god:.. see:... meeting:.. evil:.. very rāña
dasinā Priya- priyēna Dēvānaṁ- king:.. looking:.. kindly beloved:.. god:..
rañō priasa Dēvana- king:.. beloved:.. god:..

‘King Beloved-of-the-Gods’ (Shahbazgarhi 1:1)

    * (4)

rājā dasi Priya- priyō Dēvānaṁ- pasati samājamhi dōsaṁ hi bahukaṁ king:..
looking:.. kindly beloved:.. god:.. see:... meeting:.. evil:.. very rāña
dasinā Priya- priyēna Dēvānaṁ- king:.. looking:.. kindly beloved:.. god:..
rañō priasa Dēvana- king:.. beloved:.. god:.. das[i]nā Piya- piyēna Dēvānaṁ-
looking:.. kindly beloved:.. god:..

‘Beloved-of-the-Gods Looking-Kindly’ (Kalsi 1:1) Now backed with our
crosslinguistic evidence, we agree with ?) that nmod or a subtyped label of it
is the best descriptor for nominal epithets. We specifically picked the
subtyped label so that we can query instances of the construction for future
analysis.

###  5.2 Predicated -ta construction

The -ta construction666Philologically known as the past passive participle. in
Sanskrit forms participles from verbal roots. These participles are
morphologically deverbal adjectives, taking gender (without having intrinsic
fixed gender like nouns), case, and number marking without marking person
(unlike finite verb forms).

  * (5)

rājā dasi Priya- priyō Dēvānaṁ- pasati samājamhi dōsaṁ hi bahukaṁ king:..
looking:.. kindly beloved:.. god:.. see:... meeting:.. evil:.. very rāña
dasinā Priya- priyēna Dēvānaṁ- king:.. looking:.. kindly beloved:.. god:..
rañō priasa Dēvana- king:.. beloved:.. god:.. das[i]nā Piya- piyēna Dēvānaṁ-
looking:.. kindly beloved:.. god:.. cauraḣ hataḣ rājñā thief:.. kill:...
king:..

‘a thief killed by a king’ (lit. ‘a king-killed thief’) (Sanskrit) In
Sanskrit, especially in post-Vedic texts, it can also be interpreted with
(past) perfect meaning. -ta forms agree in case/gender/number with the object,
unlike the finite verbs of this stage of Indo-Aryan.

    * (6)

rājā dasi Priya- priyō Dēvānaṁ- pasati samājamhi dōsaṁ hi bahukaṁ king:..
looking:.. kindly beloved:.. god:.. see:... meeting:.. evil:.. very rāña
dasinā Priya- priyēna Dēvānaṁ- king:.. looking:.. kindly beloved:.. god:..
rañō priasa Dēvana- king:.. beloved:.. god:.. das[i]nā Piya- piyēna Dēvānaṁ-
looking:.. kindly beloved:.. god:.. cauraḣ hataḣ rājñā thief:.. kill:...
king:.. likʰitā lipī mayā write:... text:.. .

‘the text was written by me’ (passive)
‘I wrote the text’ (ergative) (Sanskrit)

This use is extremely common in Ashokan Prakrit and is the point of contention
discussed here. According to one view, -ta formed resultative777As opposed to
stative adjectives, resultatives imply that a prior event occurred to cause
the current state conveyed by the adjective. Compare English is hidden with
has been hidden [Condoravdi and Deo, 2014]. adjectives in early OIA, gradually
shifting towards main predicate function in first intransitive and later
transitive verbs (the agent receiving case marking) by late OIA [Reinöhl,
2018, Condoravdi and Deo, 2014, Peterson, 1998]. This construction is
ancestral to the tense/aspect-based split ergativity observed in many later
NIA languages. In such languages, the Sanskrit participle has developed into a
perfect verb that agrees with the object, while other inflected forms in the
verb paradigm agree with the subject. Since Ashokan Prakrit was still
undergoing this transition to split ergativity, we could analyze this
construction either way: as a resultative predicate adjective or a perfect-
aspect verb.

In Ashokan Prakrit, with the loss of the inherited active aorist as a
productive category, -ta forms have become the unmarked strategy to express
the past perfect [Bubeník, 1998]. We believe, with some certainty, that this
construction is not passive at least as late as Ashokan Prakrit (if it ever
was). Evidence ?) provide against a passive analysis in Sanskrit also applies
here. A key argument is that -ta occurs with both transitive and intransitive
verbs, and in the case of the latter, does not form an “impersonal passive” as
would be expected of a passivized intransitive.

As such, we adopt an ergative-like analysis of the -ta construction in Ashokan
Prakrit, agreeing with ?)’s view of the corresponding construction in Pali
(another early MIA lect) as being a periphrastic perfect. Indeed, as exhibited
in the example in figure 4(a) which is glossed in (7), the -ta form agrees in
number and gender with the object, while the agent receives instrumental
marking. The object dʰrama-dipi is still in the nominative case.

  * (7)

rājā dasi Priya- priyō Dēvānaṁ- pasati samājamhi dōsaṁ hi bahukaṁ king:..
looking:.. kindly beloved:.. god:.. see:... meeting:.. evil:.. very rāña
dasinā Priya- priyēna Dēvānaṁ- king:.. looking:.. kindly beloved:.. god:..
rañō priasa Dēvana- king:.. beloved:.. god:.. das[i]nā Piya- piyēna Dēvānaṁ-
looking:.. kindly beloved:.. god:.. cauraḣ hataḣ rājñā thief:.. kill:...
king:.. likʰitā lipī mayā write:... text:.. . likʰapita rajina draśina Priya-
priyēna Dēvanaṁ- dipi dʰrama- ayi write:.... king:.. looking:.. kindly
beloved:.. god:.. rescript:.. morality :.

‘King Beloved-of-the-Gods Looking-Kindly has caused this rescript on morality
to be written’ (Mansehra 1:1)

With respect to UD annotation, our ergative-like analysis translates to the
agent rajina receiving the DEPREL nsubj and the object dipi obj (instead of
obl:agent and nsubj:pass of the passive analysis in figure 4(b)).

[column sep=0.6cm] ayi & dʰrama & dipi & Dēvanaṁ- & priyēna & Priya- & draśina
& rajina & likʰapita
PRON & NOUN & NOUN & NOUN & ADJ & ADJ & ADJ & NOUN & VERB
9root 98nsubj 31det 32compound [edge unit distance=2.2ex]93obj 54nmod [edge
unit distance=2.4ex]85nmod:desc 76amod 87nmod:desc

(a) The ergative-like analysis, with nsubj and obj

[column sep=0.6cm] ayi & dʰrama & dipi & Dēvanaṁ- & priyēna & Priya- & draśina
& rajina & likʰapita
PRON & NOUN & NOUN & NOUN & ADJ & ADJ & ADJ & NOUN & VERB
9root 98obl:agent 31det 32compound [edge unit distance=2.2ex]93nsubj:pass
54nmod [edge unit distance=2.4ex]85nmod:desc 76amod 87nmod:desc

(b) The passive analysis, with obl:agent and nsubj:pass

Figure 4: Two possible analyses of the predicated -ta construction in the
sentence ’king Beloved-of-the-Gods Looking-Kindly has caused this rescript on
morality to be written’ (Mansehra 1:1). The above was ultimately chosen.

####  5.2.1 Differential agent marking

Cross-dialectally as well as dialect-internally, Ashokan Prakrit varies with
respect to how the agent phrase is marked in -ta constructions. Agents may
receive either instrumental or (with lesser frequency) genitive case marking,
though the basis for this alternation is not wholly clear.

  * (8)

rājā dasi Priya- priyō Dēvānaṁ- pasati samājamhi dōsaṁ hi bahukaṁ king:..
looking:.. kindly beloved:.. god:.. see:... meeting:.. evil:.. very rāña
dasinā Priya- priyēna Dēvānaṁ- king:.. looking:.. kindly beloved:.. god:..
rañō priasa Dēvana- king:.. beloved:.. god:.. das[i]nā Piya- piyēna Dēvānaṁ-
looking:.. kindly beloved:.. god:.. cauraḣ hataḣ rājñā thief:.. kill:...
king:.. likʰitā lipī mayā write:... text:.. . likʰapita rajina draśina Priya-
priyēna Dēvanaṁ- dipi dʰrama- ayi write:.... king:.. looking:.. kindly
beloved:.. god:.. rescript:.. morality :. kaṭē kayānē bahu mamayā sē do:...
good_deed:.. many 1. now

‘Now, I did many good deeds.’ (Kalsi 5:4)

    * (9)

rājā dasi Priya- priyō Dēvānaṁ- pasati samājamhi dōsaṁ hi bahukaṁ king:..
looking:.. kindly beloved:.. god:.. see:... meeting:.. evil:.. very rāña
dasinā Priya- priyēna Dēvānaṁ- king:.. looking:.. kindly beloved:.. god:..
rañō priasa Dēvana- king:.. beloved:.. god:.. das[i]nā Piya- piyēna Dēvānaṁ-
looking:.. kindly beloved:.. god:.. cauraḣ hataḣ rājñā thief:.. kill:...
king:.. likʰitā lipī mayā write:... text:.. . likʰapita rajina draśina Priya-
priyēna Dēvanaṁ- dipi dʰrama- ayi write:.... king:.. looking:.. kindly
beloved:.. god:.. rescript:.. morality :. kaṭē kayānē bahu mamayā sē do:...
good_deed:.. many 1. now vijitā Kaligyā lājinē daśinē Piya- piyaśa Dēvānaṁ-
conquer:... Kalinga:.. king:.. looking:.. kindly beloved:.. god:..

‘… king Beloved-of-the-Gods Looking-Kindly conquered the Kalingas.’ (Kalsi
13:1) ?)’s analysis suggests discourse-pragmatic factors may be at play; the
genitive agent conveys old (i.e. contextually given and/or definite)
information while the instrumental agent conveys new information. On this
basis, he also claims these represent two separate constructions, a passive
and an ergative respectively, though this proposal has some flaws (see
[Bubeník, 1998] for criticisms).

We tentatively follow ?) in analyzing the situation as one of differential
agent marking (DAM) [Arkadiev, 2017], whereby two agent-marking cases are
distributed along (potentially irrecoverable) semantic/pragmatic lines. Thus
we stuck with standard morphological analysis of the case features in these
agents, i.e. Case=Gen/Ins rather than explicitly proposing Case=Erg as an
Ashokan Prakrit feature. DAM seems to affect both the agents of the ergative-
like -ta construction as well as the oblique agents of finite passives in
Ashokan Prakrit. Of the source constructions in Vedic, ?) explains there is a
broad tendency for ‘active’ verbs to favor instrumental agents, and
‘ingestive’ verbs (perception, consumption, etc.) to favor the genitive, but
the instrumental becomes default in later stages of Old Indo-Aryan. Further
annotation of the Ashokan Prakrit corpus will allow us to probe into these
hypotheses with statistical tools.

Additionally, the influence of Ashoka’s administrative language, an eastern
dialect from which other dialectal edicts were likely translated [Oberlies,
2003], should not be neglected. If the choice between instrumental and
genitive marking is at least partially a function of dialect, direct
translation from Ashoka’s variety could leave relic forms888One such example
of dialectal interference is .. -ē, a non-western isogloss, attested in place
of the expected -ō in Girnar (a western dialect)  (otherwise inconsistent with
the internal distribution of cases) in other edicts.

###  5.3 Sandhi

Sanskrit texts (which in written form all post-date the Ashokan edicts)
generally orthographically indicate sandhi, a kind of phonological
assimilation at morpheme boundaries [Allen, 1962]. Some examples from Sanskrit
are given in (10).

  * (10)

    * (11)

gaccʰati arjunaḣ gaccʰatyarjunaḣ (Sanskrit)

      * (12)

saḣ aham sō’ham

        * (13)

brahma asmi brahmāsmi Middle Indo-Aryan has more haphazard orthographic
indication of sandhi rules [Dočkalová, 2009], even though these assimilations
likely persisted in speech. For example, Pali shows sandhi in compounds
(especially those inherited directly from Old Indo-Aryan and then subject to
normal sound changes), some function words (emphatic ēva, preverbs, etc.),
pronouns, and sometimes in nominal arguments to verbs, noun–noun relations,
and vocatives [Childers, 1879]. That is, Pali optionally indicates sandhi only
between syntactically related words [Oberlies, 2001, p. 116].

We observed similar occurrences in the Ashokan Prakrit corpus. We think
certain rare cases of sandhi in Ashokan Prakrit may be examples of
grammaticalization (the development of a postposition with case-like
properties) and lexicalization (compounds that are no longer as transparent).
These pose issues for UD annotation.

####  5.3.1 Grammaticalization of atʰāya ~ aṭʰāya

One case where sandhi may gives us clues about morphological change is
occurrences of atʰāya ‘for the purpose [of]’, the dative of atʰa ‘purpose’ (<
Sanskrit ártʰa). In the prototypical example below, sandhi with the preceding
nominal stem causes vowel lengthening.

      * (14)

rājā dasi Priya- priyō Dēvānaṁ- pasati samājamhi dōsaṁ hi bahukaṁ king:..
looking:.. kindly beloved:.. god:.. see:... meeting:.. evil:.. very rāña
dasinā Priya- priyēna Dēvānaṁ- king:.. looking:.. kindly beloved:.. god:..
rañō priasa Dēvana- king:.. beloved:.. god:.. das[i]nā Piya- piyēna Dēvānaṁ-
looking:.. kindly beloved:.. god:.. cauraḣ hataḣ rājñā thief:.. kill:...
king:.. likʰitā lipī mayā write:... text:.. . likʰapita rajina draśina Priya-
priyēna Dēvanaṁ- dipi dʰrama- ayi write:.... king:.. looking:.. kindly
beloved:.. god:.. rescript:.. morality :. kaṭē kayānē bahu mamayā sē do:...
good_deed:.. many 1. now vijitā Kaligyā lājinē daśinē Piya- piyaśa Dēvānaṁ-
conquer:... Kalinga:.. king:.. looking:.. kindly beloved:.. god:.. ātʰāya sūp-
ārabʰarē prāṇā ēva tī purpose:.. curry kill:... animal:.. three

‘Only three animals are being killed for the purpose of curry.’ (Girnar 1:7)
While the Ashokan Prakrit construction we are dealing with is a compound999 A
similar construction involving “compounded” artʰāya also occurs in certain
Sanskrit texts, cf. harṣaṇārthāya harṣaṇa + arthāya ‘for the purpose of
protection’[Fritz, 2002]. , not a genitive noun modifier, ?) describes a
potentially related phenomenon based on Classical Sanskrit and Pali corpora:
the post-Vedic genitive shift, wherein many adverbs and adjectives were
analysed as taking the genitive and periphrastically replacing case relations,
e.g. -asya artʰāya ‘for the purpose of …’. Sanskrit generally uses the dative
case by itself to indicate Purpose, so this compounded construction in Ashokan
Prakrit may be an intermediate phase in the genitive shift.

For UD, this is a tricky situation. We were stuck between describing atʰāya as
a case complement to sūpa, or as instead the head of an NP, both shown in
figure 5. Given similar constructions with ending-less nouns in compounds,
atʰāya would usually be analysed as the head here, but if it has been
grammaticalized then case would be a better DEPREL as is used for case markers
and clitics in New Indo-Aryan UD, and UD prefers content heads. Girnar 4:10
also has ētāya atʰāya ‘for this purpose’ which lacks sandhi or stem-
compounding, but this may be exceptional since ētad can take the det DEPREL as
a modifier to nouns and so does not behave like a true nominal. Pending better
evidence supporting either analysis, we settled on the latter. An interesting
data point is that a similar construction is the etymological source of the
dative case in the Insular Indo-Aryan languages, Dhivehi and Sinhala.

      * (15)

rājā dasi Priya- priyō Dēvānaṁ- pasati samājamhi dōsaṁ hi bahukaṁ king:..
looking:.. kindly beloved:.. god:.. see:... meeting:.. evil:.. very rāña
dasinā Priya- priyēna Dēvānaṁ- king:.. looking:.. kindly beloved:.. god:..
rañō priasa Dēvana- king:.. beloved:.. god:.. das[i]nā Piya- piyēna Dēvānaṁ-
looking:.. kindly beloved:.. god:.. cauraḣ hataḣ rājñā thief:.. kill:...
king:.. likʰitā lipī mayā write:... text:.. . likʰapita rajina draśina Priya-
priyēna Dēvanaṁ- dipi dʰrama- ayi write:.... king:.. looking:.. kindly
beloved:.. god:.. rescript:.. morality :. kaṭē kayānē bahu mamayā sē do:...
good_deed:.. many 1. now vijitā Kaligyā lājinē daśinē Piya- piyaśa Dēvānaṁ-
conquer:... Kalinga:.. king:.. looking:.. kindly beloved:.. god:.. ātʰāya sūp-
ārabʰarē prāṇā ēva tī purpose:.. curry kill:... animal:.. three diya e=ge-aṣ̊
mamma go.. 3=house- mother

‘Mother went to that house.’ (adapted from Lum, [Lum, 2020]: 118) (Dhivehi)

      * (16)

rājā dasi Priya- priyō Dēvānaṁ- pasati samājamhi dōsaṁ hi bahukaṁ king:..
looking:.. kindly beloved:.. god:.. see:... meeting:.. evil:.. very rāña
dasinā Priya- priyēna Dēvānaṁ- king:.. looking:.. kindly beloved:.. god:..
rañō priasa Dēvana- king:.. beloved:.. god:.. das[i]nā Piya- piyēna Dēvānaṁ-
looking:.. kindly beloved:.. god:.. cauraḣ hataḣ rājñā thief:.. kill:...
king:.. likʰitā lipī mayā write:... text:.. . likʰapita rajina draśina Priya-
priyēna Dēvanaṁ- dipi dʰrama- ayi write:.... king:.. looking:.. kindly
beloved:.. god:.. rescript:.. morality :. kaṭē kayānē bahu mamayā sē do:...
good_deed:.. many 1. now vijitā Kaligyā lājinē daśinē Piya- piyaśa Dēvānaṁ-
conquer:... Kalinga:.. king:.. looking:.. kindly beloved:.. god:.. ātʰāya sūp-
ārabʰarē prāṇā ēva tī purpose:.. curry kill:... animal:.. three diya e=ge-aṣ̊
mamma go.. 3=house- mother giyā gedr-ṭ ē ammā go. house.- 4 mother

‘Mother went to that house.’ (Sinhala)

The Sinhala -()ṭ and Dhivehi -aṣ̊ datives are both reflexes of Sanskrit
ártʰāya (or, possibly, the accusative case ártʰaṁ) [Fritz, 2002] and have
expanded their semantic domains to include other roles such as goal. Ashokan
Prakrit’s compounding of atʰāya may represent an early stage towards a similar
grammaticalization, though its precise synchronic status is unclear. Future UD
annotation of MIA corpora will allow us to better track such phenomena from a
comparative perspective.101010It is worth noting that an inscriptionally-
attested Middle Indo-Aryan ancestor of Sinhala, roughly contemporaneous with
the Ashokan edicts, formed a periphrastic dative of purpose with aṭaya (cf.
śagaśa aṭaya ‘for the benefit of the sangha’) [Premaratne, 1969,
Paranavithana, 1970]. Here, as is also observed with Pali’s attʰāya
construction [Reinöhl, 2016, Fahs, 1989], the nominal śaga ‘sangha’ takes
genitive case marking. In contrast, Ashokan Prakrit employs either a dative
dependent (e.g. etāya) or the stem-compounding strategy described above. It
cannot be ruled out, however, that the modern Sinhala and Dhivehi datives
originate in a similar compound-like use of ártʰāya [Fritz, 2002].

[column sep=0.6cm] ārabʰarē & sūpa & atʰāya
VERB & NOUN & NOUN
1root 32nmod 13obl

(a) normal NP

[column sep=0.6cm] ārabʰarē & sūpa & atʰāya
VERB & NOUN & ADP
1root 12obl 23case

(b) grammaticalized case

Figure 5: Two potential analyses of the atʰāya construction in Girnar 1:7.

####  5.3.2 Other cases

Another unexpected sandhi was observed in Girnar 2:2, manusōpagāni ca
pasōpagāni ca ‘beneficial to man and beneficial to animal’. The form
pasōpagāni is underlying pasu ‘(domestic) animal’ + upagāni ‘benefits’,
wherein the sandhi of u + u gives ō rather than expected ū (as in Sanskrit) or
u (as in Pali). This sandhi is found in every other edition of the edict;
Jaugada even has pasu-ōpagāni. Like the previous example, we could claim that
upagāni is undergoing grammaticalized to a benefactive postposition here, but
we feel it is too speculative to claim that, and instead believe it to be
phonological analogy with manusōpagāni. We analysed it as a noun compound with
DEPREL nmod.

##  6 Future work

The main task ahead of us involves completing annotation, which will require
gathering and critical editing of Ashokan texts discovered in the past century
that are yet to be digitally compiled. What has been annotated already will be
included within the next annual UD corpus release.

After a good selection of annotated inscriptions from several dialects is
available, we will make use of computational methods to analyze the corpus.
Automatic word-level alignment between dialectal variants of the same edict
will enable us to compare dependency structure, case marking, sound change
outcomes, along with other dialectal features. On the technical side, we would
also like to see if training data from Sanskrit with finetuning on the smaller
Ashokan corpus could be used to automatically perform UD annotation of texts
in other Middle Indo-Aryan languages.

More broadly, we would like to continue UD annotation of texts in earlier
Indo-Aryan languages in order to have data to better address historical
linguistic questions. Given the value already demonstrated by corpus data for
Indo-Aryan historical linguistics [Stroński and Verbeke, 2020], open-access
corpora annotated using Universal Dependencies, with fine-grained analyses of
morphology and syntax beyond individual glossed examples, will surely help put
some of the controversial issues in the field to rest. Comparisons of Ashokan
Prakrit with other stages of Indo-Aryan will help us study language change,
e.g. the development of configurationality in Middle Indo-Aryan [Reinöhl,
2016]. Dialectal variation (and possible substrate influence) in Ashokan
Prakrit should also be studied in comparison with regional NIA data. Other
recent work in computational approaches to this area [Cathcart and Rama, 2020,
Cathcart, 2020, Arora et al., 2021, Arora and Farris, 2021] encouraged us to
pursue the study of South Asian historical linguistics from a similar angle.

Some texts we hope to treebank in the future include: the Pāli Canon, plays in
the various later Dramatic Prakrits (e.g. Gāhā Sattasaī), the Lōmāfānu
documents (Old Dhivehi), the Bāṇāsurakatʰā (Old Kashmiri), the Gurū Grantʰ
Sāhib (Sant Bhāṣā, Old Punjabi), the Caryāpada (Old Bengali), the Šāh jō
Risālō (Sindhi), and epics and poetry from the Hindi Belt and Maharashtra.
Serious work on typology in South Asia will also require treebanking for
Dravidian (which has a long historical attestation), Munda, and other language
families of the region.

## Acknowledgements

We thank John Peterson for his continuous guidance in our work on Ashokan
Prakrit, and Amir Zeldes, Nathan Schneider, and Samopriya Basu for their
helpful comments on the manuscript. We also thank the three anonymous UDW
reviewers for their constructive feedback.

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