introducing the interpretation of medieval Hindī texts into the Hindī curriculum : an alternative approach

The author has been trying, for several years now, to apply and further expand the method of detailed morphological analysis of Old Hindī texts first developed by the Czech Indologist Vladimir Miltner in his Old Hindī Reader and to test it in the courses given at the institute of indology at charles university, Prague. this paper demonstrates the possibilities this still little used descriptive approach offers to students who have basic knowledge of Modern Standard Hindī and wish to gain an insight into the grammatical structure of Old Hindī literary dialects. Careful use of this method helps highlight, among other things, the high degree of homonymy of grammatical morphemes and the consequent frequent ambiguity of meaning. A continuous text segmented into basic morphological units can be processed by a concordancing software and further analysed with the help of methods developed in the field of corpus linguistics. An appendix to the paper shows the method as applied to the analysis of one short pad (poem) of a medieval Hindī poet, Sant Kabīr. The use of this method in classes helps the students read and interpret a greater quantity of texts in a relatively short time. This can serve as an incentive on the one hand to work with the literary material in the source language and on the other to pay closer attention to distinctive features of written and oral traditions in their wider social contexts. Most scholars engaged in teaching courses of modern indo-aryan languages at the university level are familiar with one specific problem that invariably turns up after students finish the basic course of a modern written and spoken language and are encouraged to turn their attention toward wider cultural contexts and deeper historical perspectives behind modern literary works. Students certainly know that the literary tradition of, e.g., Hindī does not begin in the first decades of the 19th century and may be curious about its older phases. After all, it is difficult to imagine studying English as a subject at the university level without being able to read and analyse texts of Chaucer or Shakespeare. Therefore, it should be only natural for a student of Hindī to read and enjoy texts written by or ascribed to Tulsīdas, Gorakhnāth, Kabīr or Mīrā. Many scholars and teachers of Hindī would perhaps agree with another proposition, namely, that introducing students to the language (or languages) of the aforementioned Hindī poets is more difficult than encouraging them to interpret Shakespeare’s sonnets. Basically, teachers of Hindī can choose between two different approaches: ISSN 1648–2662. ACTA ORIENTALIA VILNENSIA 9 .2 (2008) : 25–38 26 J A R O S L AV S T R N A D those more philologically oriented would explain basic grammatical features of the main Hindī literary dialects, Avadhī, Braj and possibly Diṅgal, and then students would proceed to read specimens of selected works and authors. The advantage of this approach lies in the firm grammatical framework mastered by students well in advance, which makes them aware of the position of these dialects in the broad historical development of the New Indo-Aryan languages. The disadvantage is that this preparatory stage, undoubtedly worth the effort in itself, is relatively time-consuming and in the general plan of a curriculum often leaves relatively little time for reading larger sections of texts. Specimens read in class may be selected primarily with the intention to illustrate grammatical phenomena rather than to show literary creations in their own right as works of art and of intellectual or spiritual depth. Moreover, this systematic approach based primarily on acquaintance with the standard grammars of literary dialects (Braj or Avadhī) does not work well with texts ascribed, e.g., to Gorakhnāth, Nāmdev or Kabīr, which show many irregularities and aberrations from standard forms found in grammars. the other approach, perhaps more direct and intuitive, is best represented by readers working with texts in the original language and their parallel translationsan excellent example is Rupert Snell’s The Hindī Classical Tradition: A Braj Bhāṣā Reader, published by sOas, london (1991), and used in several university courses across Europe and in the USA. Here, grammatical explanations, which form the first chapter of the book, are kept to a minimum and the student is invited to delve quickly into the texts themselves and to look for additional information in copious and informative notes accompanying the text. The text itself is arranged as a mirror: the left page contains the Hindī original in Devanāgarī, and the right its close translation in English, accompanied by copious explanatory notes. Students thus can proceed more quickly, acquaint themselves, in a limited amount of time, with greater quantity and variety of texts, and therefore get a better chance to appreciate them as works of art. A slight disadvantage of this method is that it may encourage a somewhat superficial attitude towards the purely grammatical, morphological and syntactical aspects of these texts: once a correct meaning, sometimes perhaps arrived at by looking at the English translation, is established, one ceases to worry about this or that grammatical peculiarity or irregular feature. students using this particular reader get a good introduction into a literary tradition and a literary dialect, but their ability to analyse grammatical forms correctly will be exposed to a hard test, especially when they encounter texts composed not in standard dialects. Here problems arising from frequent homonymy, especially of grammatical morphs, which can sometimes lead to different interpretations of meaning, are aggravated by occasional incidence of forms that can be described either as archaisms or as borrowings from some other dialect. Kabīr’s 27 I N T R O D u C I N g T h E I N T E R p R E TAT I O N O F M E D I E VA L h I N D ī T E x T S language, for example, has been often characterized by modern Hindī scholars as khicaṛī bhāṣā, a mixture of forms coming from various dialects of western and eastern parts of the Hindī area.1 The purpose of this paper is to offer still another approach to the study of Old Hindī literary dialects and texts, a method developed during the 60s and 70s of the last century by an eminent Czech Indologist, the late Dr Vladimír Miltner. Miltner looked at the language from the point of view of descriptive linguistics and subjected selected texts to detailed and rigorous analysis of their morphological and syntactical structure. He demonstrated his method of morphological analysis of an Old Hindī text for the first time in the 1960s in his short study called Early Hindī Morphology and Syntax (Miltner 1966) and developed it further in his Old Hindī Reader, which was ready for publication in the 1970s. Due to the adversity of those times, however, it could be published only as late as 1998 (Miltner 1998). In this latter work, Miltner takes specimens of texts written by or ascribed to thirteen Hindī authors of the pre-modern era (Roḍā, Joindu, Dāmodar, Gorakhnāth, Cand, Kabīr, Vidyāpati, Jāyasi, Sūr, Tulsī, Mīrā, Gokulnāth and Biharī Lāl). He analyses each word into its constituent morphs, lexical and grammatical, orders them into an alphabetical sequence and thus obtains a detailed index of all morphological elements occurring in the texts in question. The alphabetical ordering shows a great degree of homonymy, a feature encountered frequently, particularly in the case of grammatical morphs: all homonyms are marked by index numbers. Further, as elements of a system, the occurrence of all morphs is co-determined by their immediate context, i.e., by other morphs that precede and morphs that follow the morph in question. For example, the grammatical morph -i can mean three different things when found at the end of a verbal base (as in kah-i: 3rd pers. sg. pres., 2nd pers. sg. imper., and absolutive) and has still other possible meanings when found at the end of a nominal base (dir. sg. f., as in khabar-i, ‘report’; obl. sg. m., as in ghar-i, ‘house’; or obl. sg. f., as in dis-i, ‘side’, ‘direction’). Each morph entered into the index is therefore furnished with information about all other morphs, lexical as well as grammatical, that immediately precede and follow it in the texts that were excerpted and included in the reader. in the introduction to his book, Miltner assures his readers that the ‘process of interpretation is very simple and requires minimal brainwork’. Practical experience in 1 Probably an extreme example of interpenetration of one medieval dialect or language by another can be found in the corpus of Hindī pads of the medieval mystical poet Nāmdev originating in Mahārāṣṭra. W.M. Callewaert and M. Lath, in their edition of Nāmdev’s songs, give a good specimen of this phenomenon when they draw attention to song no. 165 of Nāmdev’s Hindī corpus. The song is composed largely in Marāṭhī. ‘To a Rājasthānī audience the song would have made senseto whatever extent it did make sense―only with “Rājasthānī meanings”. This implies that phrases with a particular meaning in Marāṭhī, probably meant something totally different in Rājasthānī’ (Callewaert, Lath 1989, 401–2 [commentary], 352–3 [the song]). 28 J A R O S L AV S T R N A D Old Hindī courses has convinced me that this assessment is more or less realistic. Of course, students have to master the grammatical terminology used for the description of indo-aryan languages, but, at this more advanced level of training, meeting this requirement poses no particular problem. an important part of the task of preparing such a reader is the correct decision concerning the quantity and variety of texts selected for inclusion. Processing just one or two short poems may suffice for the purposes of basic instruction but leaves the student with little scope for his or her own interpretation: as each morphological element turns up only once or twice, the 

Most scholars engaged in teaching courses of modern indo-aryan languages at the university level are familiar with one specific problem that invariably turns up after students finish the basic course of a modern written and spoken language and are encouraged to turn their attention toward wider cultural contexts and deeper historical perspectives behind modern literary works.Students certainly know that the literary tradition of, e.g., Hindī does not begin in the first decades of the 19 th century and may be curious about its older phases.After all, it is difficult to imagine studying English as a subject at the university level without being able to read and analyse texts of Chaucer or Shakespeare.Therefore, it should be only natural for a student of Hindī to read and enjoy texts written by or ascribed to Tulsīdas, Gorakhnāth, Kabīr or Mīrā.
Many scholars and teachers of Hindī would perhaps agree with another proposition, namely, that introducing students to the language (or languages) of the aforementioned Hindī poets is more difficult than encouraging them to interpret Shakespeare's sonnets.Basically, teachers of Hindī can choose between two different approaches: those more philologically oriented would explain basic grammatical features of the main Hindī literary dialects, Avadhī, Braj and possibly Diṅgal, and then students would proceed to read specimens of selected works and authors.The advantage of this approach lies in the firm grammatical framework mastered by students well in advance, which makes them aware of the position of these dialects in the broad historical development of the New Indo-Aryan languages.The disadvantage is that this preparatory stage, undoubtedly worth the effort in itself, is relatively time-consuming and in the general plan of a curriculum often leaves relatively little time for reading larger sections of texts.Specimens read in class may be selected primarily with the intention to illustrate grammatical phenomena rather than to show literary creations in their own right as works of art and of intellectual or spiritual depth.Moreover, this systematic approach based primarily on acquaintance with the standard grammars of literary dialects (Braj or Avadhī) does not work well with texts ascribed, e.g., to Gorakhnāth, Nāmdev or Kabīr, which show many irregularities and aberrations from standard forms found in grammars.
the other approach, perhaps more direct and intuitive, is best represented by readers working with texts in the original language and their parallel translationsan excellent example is Rupert Snell's The Hindī Classical Tradition: A Braj Bhāṣā Reader, published by sOas, london (1991), and used in several university courses across Europe and in the USA.Here, grammatical explanations, which form the first chapter of the book, are kept to a minimum and the student is invited to delve quickly into the texts themselves and to look for additional information in copious and informative notes accompanying the text.The text itself is arranged as a mirror: the left page contains the Hindī original in Devanāgarī, and the right its close translation in English, accompanied by copious explanatory notes.Students thus can proceed more quickly, acquaint themselves, in a limited amount of time, with greater quantity and variety of texts, and therefore get a better chance to appreciate them as works of art.A slight disadvantage of this method is that it may encourage a somewhat superficial attitude towards the purely grammatical, morphological and syntactical aspects of these texts: once a correct meaning, sometimes perhaps arrived at by looking at the English translation, is established, one ceases to worry about this or that grammatical peculiarity or irregular feature.students using this particular reader get a good introduction into a literary tradition and a literary dialect, but their ability to analyse grammatical forms correctly will be exposed to a hard test, especially when they encounter texts composed not in standard dialects.Here problems arising from frequent homonymy, especially of grammatical morphs, which can sometimes lead to different interpretations of meaning, are aggravated by occasional incidence of forms that can be described either as archaisms or as borrowings from some other dialect.Kabīr's language, for example, has been often characterized by modern Hindī scholars as khicaṛī bhāṣā, a mixture of forms coming from various dialects of western and eastern parts of the Hindī area. 1  The purpose of this paper is to offer still another approach to the study of Old Hindī literary dialects and texts, a method developed during the 60s and 70s of the last century by an eminent Czech Indologist, the late Dr Vladimír Miltner.Miltner looked at the language from the point of view of descriptive linguistics and subjected selected texts to detailed and rigorous analysis of their morphological and syntactical structure.He demonstrated his method of morphological analysis of an Old Hindī text for the first time in the 1960s in his short study called Early Hindī Morphology and Syntax (Miltner 1966) and developed it further in his Old Hindī Reader, which was ready for publication in the 1970s.Due to the adversity of those times, however, it could be published only as late as 1998 (Miltner 1998).
In this latter work, Miltner takes specimens of texts written by or ascribed to thirteen Hindī authors of the pre-modern era (Roḍā, Joindu, Dāmodar, Gorakhnāth, Cand, Kabīr, Vidyāpati, Jāyasi, Sūr, Tulsī, Mīrā, Gokulnāth and Biharī Lāl).He analyses each word into its constituent morphs, lexical and grammatical, orders them into an alphabetical sequence and thus obtains a detailed index of all morphological elements occurring in the texts in question.The alphabetical ordering shows a great degree of homonymy, a feature encountered frequently, particularly in the case of grammatical morphs: all homonyms are marked by index numbers.Further, as elements of a system, the occurrence of all morphs is co-determined by their immediate context, i.e., by other morphs that precede and morphs that follow the morph in question.For example, the grammatical morph -i can mean three different things when found at the end of a verbal base (as in kah-i: 3 rd pers.sg.pres., 2 nd pers.sg.imper., and absolutive) and has still other possible meanings when found at the end of a nominal base (dir.sg.f., as in khabar-i, 'report'; obl.sg.m., as in ghar-i, 'house'; or obl.sg.f., as in dis-i, 'side', 'direction').Each morph entered into the index is therefore furnished with information about all other morphs, lexical as well as grammatical, that immediately precede and follow it in the texts that were excerpted and included in the reader.
in the introduction to his book, Miltner assures his readers that the 'process of interpretation is very simple and requires minimal brainwork'.Practical experience in 1 Probably an extreme example of interpenetration of one medieval dialect or language by another can be found in the corpus of Hindī pads of the medieval mystical poet Nāmdev originating in Mahārāṣṭra.W.M. Callewaert and M. Lath, in their edition of Nāmdev's songs, give a good specimen of this phenomenon when they draw attention to song no.165 of Nāmdev's Hindī corpus.The song is composed largely in Marāṭhī.'To a Rājasthānī audience the song would have made senseto whatever extent it did make sense-only with "Rājasthānī meanings".This implies that phrases with a particular meaning in Marāṭhī, probably meant something totally different in Rājasthānī' (Callewaert, Lath 1989, 401-2 [commentary], 352-3 [the song]).
Old Hindī courses has convinced me that this assessment is more or less realistic.Of course, students have to master the grammatical terminology used for the description of indo-aryan languages, but, at this more advanced level of training, meeting this requirement poses no particular problem.
an important part of the task of preparing such a reader is the correct decision concerning the quantity and variety of texts selected for inclusion.Processing just one or two short poems may suffice for the purposes of basic instruction but leaves the student with little scope for his or her own interpretation: as each morphological element turns up only once or twice, the interpreter is left with the very simple task of reassembling the jigsaw-puzzle of the segmented text to its original form.The student scarcely meets any real ambiguity, e.g., a case when he or she would have to ponder whether the correct form to select in a particular case is the 2 nd pers.sg.imperative or 3 rd pers.sg. of the indicative: there is a relatively high probability that in a morphemicon based on too little morphologically segmented material, the verbal base in question will appear in combination with only one of these two homonymous morphs.The larger the corpus of analysed texts is, the greater the probability that the verbal base will be found to coexist with the other morph too.In such a case, an interpreter will be faced with the dilemma of which morph to select; and the very awareness of this possibility of choice will induce him or her to look at the wider context of the word and the sentence.in some cases, the student may come to the conclusion that there is a real ambiguity, implying the possibility of two different readings and meanings of one piece of text.Thus, at the very beginning of the course, the student is, so to speak, thrown into the water and made to swim.It is, of course, advisable for him or her to consult some grammatical overview where the main outlines of the dialect in question are presented in a more systematic form (students may get such materials at the beginning of the course), but the main point of this method is that the student starts with genuine texts and is able to see them in their complexity-with all their ambiguities, morphological irregularities and other peculiar features which are brought into sharp relief in the process of morphological analysis.
an important aspect that merits attention and that has been hinted at above is the language variability of the selected texts.As is obvious from the list of authors chosen by Miltner for his Old Hindī Reader, Avadhī of Tulsī and Jāyasī is presented side by side with the purely Braj works of Bihārī Lāl and Gokulnāth and with the language of Madhyadeśa, represented by Gorakhnāth and Kabīr, which is often closely related to but not identical with Braj.The Morphological Key or Morphemicon, as Miltner prefers to call it, therefore includes a wide variety of morphological forms that occur in Eastern as well as in Western Hindī; such a key cannot be used as a catalogue of forms belonging to one particular dialect or author.However, as the occurrence of eastern forms in western dialects and vice versa is not an uncommon feature with many authors (or, to be more exact, with their texts as extant in existing manuscripts, printed editions, or oral traditions), this is not necessarily a drawback.
However, the minimal amount of brainwork promised by Miltner to the student has to be more than compensated by hard intellectual labour on the part of the compiler of the Morphemicon.The morphological segmentation of words found in texts that cover a time span of more than half a millennium and area as wide as Western Europe is certainly a very difficult task, the more so, as Miltner tries to conform to a Pāṇinian ideal of maximum consistency and economy of description.An interesting problem that must have occupied him at that stage of analysis was how to solve one particular dilemma turning up time and again in the process of building up the repertoire of morphemes: when constituting a particular morph, should precedence be given to historical considerations or should the primary requirement be systemic clarity and economy of description?There is probably no clear-cut answer to this question; in my opinion, Miltner succeeded admirably in striking the middle course-most grammatical morphs constituted by him and found in the texts can be discussed as results of historical development, even if some cases are debatable. 2ith Miltner's Morphemicon at hand and with its usefulness for the practical task of analysing and translating Old Hindī texts tested in university courses, it was possible to apply his method to a larger corpus of texts ascribed to one particular author.after some deliberation, i decided to analyse a greater number of pads of the medieval Hindī poet and mystic Kabīr.Several reasons have led me to this decision.Probably the most important one was a recently published edition of the pads of Kabīr based on several relatively old manuscripts, the oldest dating back to A.D. 1614 (Callewaert 2000).The editor, Belgian scholar Winand M. Callewaert, selected ten manuscripts containing Kabīr's pads (short poems sung to a particular rāga) and organized his edition in such a way that one and the same pad (or what can still be counted as a version of one and the same pad) is presented in all its manuscript variants on the same page (or following pages).This synoptic presentation admirably shows the vari-ability inherent in the oral performance at the time when it gradually became fixed in written form and began to undergo further changes and corruptions characteristic to the transmission of the written word.For the purposes of morphological analysis, the great advantage of this type of presentation lies in the fact that one can work with and analyse one particular document, one single manuscript produced by one copyist at one time and possibly one place.Thus, the language subject to analysis has greater internal coherence than, e.g., the so-called critical editions that attempt to present the text in an-as far as possible-'original form' and are full of various emendations.3a morphemicon based on the analysis of a single manuscript-in this case, the Jaipur manuscript from the Sanjay Sharma Sangrahālaya dated 1614 (the oldest Pañc-vāṇī manuscript found and published by Callewaert in his edition)-may then reveal a specific language variant whose features can be subsequently quantified (processed by a concordancer) and, if found statistically significant in comparison with other manuscripts, can form a basis for further studies of oral as well as textual transmission of a given work.4 in this one respect, the attitude of the present author differs from Miltner's: whereas his wide selection of texts yields a very rich harvest of morphs and morphological variants, concentration on a single manuscript should help sort out regular features and exceptions or linguistic borrowings from other dialects.
Another consideration which led to my decision to concentrate on Kabīr was my feeling that this poet and thinker has so far been relatively neglected in modern studies that focus on medieval Hindī literary traditions.Great and certainly deserved attention has been paid especially to the Vaishnava authors-as a glance into bibliographies clearly shows.On the other hand, traditions of the so-called nirguṇī branch of Hindī poetry-with the significant exception of the Sikh tradition-have so far received relatively less attention.Moreover, Kabīr's words and ideas have been, in modern times, used so often for various ideological purposes that they can scarcely escape the process of simplification or even misinterpretation. 5ith these considerations in mind, I set about analysing some of Kabīr's pads closely following Miltner's method of morphological segmentation.The result has been, so far, a corpus of about one hundred pads, edited provisionally with footnotes, supplemented occasionally with modern Hindī commentaries, and followed by a morphemicon that can be used as a key for their translation and interpretation.constant referral to Miltner's Morphemicon as presented in his Old Hindī Reader and application of the morphological units he collected to new textual material convinced me of the viability of the majority of his decisions.Very few minor changes were necessary in the structure of the Morphemicon itself: one thing which seemed desirable for better understanding of the texts was the inclusion of fixed phrases or idiomatic expressions-collocations of words with special meanings, which necessarily lie beyond the process of morphological segmentation (expressions such as pĩḍ par-'to chase', 'to go after'; pnī birol-lit.'to churn water', fig.'to engage in useless activity', etc.).
However, there was still another concern that gradually pressed itself in the foreground with growing urgency as a clear desideratum: in order to make the morphological analysis of the grammatically often complex forms more comprehensible and the process of segmentation itself more transparent, a kind of grammatically and historically grounded justification for establishing a particular segment as a morph was felt necessary.Such a morphological commentary should explain the reason that a particular segment was deemed a morphological unit, discuss possible alternative solutions, and give a short exposition of the historical background.(Vladimír Miltner gave a short outline of this grammatical explanation in his Early Hindī Morphology and Syntax, but omitted it altogether in his Old Hindī Reader.)Properly researched and cross-referenced, such grammatical explanations will constitute a kind of historical grammar, a 'Text-grammatik' based on the language of one particular manuscript.As such, it could serve not only as a grammatical supplement to a proposed Kabīr reader, but also as a useful tool for future comparative studies of Old Hindī dialects.
The purpose of the appendix that follows this paper, taking one of Kabīr's pads as an example, is to present the following informationshow the basic structure of the work discussed in preceding paragraphs: 1.The original text of the pad is presented provideswith footnotes pointing out possible ambiguities of grammar and meaning.alternative readings found in other manuscripts edited by Callewaert in his Millenium Kabīr Vāṇī are included for comparison.The basic text that has been subject to further morphological analysis has been taken directly from athe Jaipur manuscript.2. Morphs that have been arrived at by the process of segmentation are presented of in the form of an appropriate, alphabetically arranged morphemicon (the indexing of morphs included in the list has been taken from the general Morphemicon which was compiled on the basis of much more extensive material and which therefore contains a greater number of homonymous mor-phological units; that is why several morphs are marked with higher index numbers).3. Historical and functional explanation of selected grammatical morphs are provided; in the Morphemicon, cross-references to these explanations are included in square brackets following the morph (in our examples, V designates the section that deals with verbs and the following digit marks the subsection devoted to a particular type of suffix or ending).4. The text of the pad is morphologically segmented and presented in a form suitable for inclusion into an electronic corpus; such a corpus of a morphologically structured text can be further analysed with the help of appropriate concordancing software (in this particular case, I have used WordSmith Tools, version 2.0, developed by Mike Scott at the University of Liverpool).As some software concordancers may have problems showing letters with diacritics correctly, the text has been converted into ASCII codes.In most cases, I hope, the ASCII equivalents of letters with diacritics will be self-evident.5.An example of a concordance showingan the occurrence of the sigmatic future in the present corpus: sentences which form the immediate natural context of such forms can be used at later stages of the research as illustrative material for paragraphed grammatical treatment of the language in question.

Explanatory grammatical notes
Section V1: -i 3 -connecting (auxiliary) vowel A. Origin and function in Miltner's Old Hindī Reader, we find -i 3 -described as a 'verbal thematic vowel' occurring before the morphs of the perfective participle (-0 2 -), verbal substantive (-b 1 -and -v 2 -) and verbal adjective (-k 3 -in choḍika:u in the text of Rāur-vel by Roḍā).The same designation, 'verbal thematic vowel', is also given to the morph -a 3 -(followed by a greater number of different morphs, i.e.inter alia by -b 2 -, a verbal adjective in the texts of Vidyāpati, Gorakh and Tulsī), to the morph -u 2 -(followed by -b 2 -in Tulsī), and to the morph -o 2 -(again followed by -b 2 -in the text of Vidyāpati).It is obvious that under one common designation we have here a group of morphs which share similar (not always identical) functions but are of different origin.
The contexts in which the morph -i 3 -occurs in Kabīr's pads from Rājasthān allows us to devise a more specific name for it: in all quotable instances it appears to be a descendant of the OIA connecting vowel (Bindevokal) used in the formation of, e.g., past participles and gerundives of the so-called seṭ-verbal roots (for a list of forms in which this Bindevokal is used in sanskrit, see, e.g., Morgenroth 1989, 125, §167.Of course, the use of the term 'connecting vowel' for both the OIA -i-and nia -i 3 -does not imply that the rules of its occurrence with particular verbal roots are identical.What we should see as significant is the origin of this nia -i 3 -, which is traceable to the OIA Bindevokal -i-, and a common function of both these suffixes in the formation of the future tense and participles.This is perhaps enough to justify the change in the designation of this morph in the context of the language of Kabir's pads, from "'verbal thematic vowel' to the more specific 'connecting vowel', a term used by Western grammarians to describe its Sanskrit predecessor (see, e.g.Burrow 1973, 331;but in ibid., 369) uses also the term 'auxiliary vowel', following perhaps the usage of W.D. Whitney).Thiel-Horstmann 1983, 42, appears to see the intermediate -i-in the perfect participles merely as a matter of alternative spelling: 'After root-final consonants -y-is often inserted.The writing may also be -iy-in such cases, thus, dekhiyā'.Kellogg 1965, 295, §497a notes the insertion of -i-before the perfect participle termination in the dialects of Rājpūtāna, 'often inserted in the "Plays"', quoting as examples sūraja ugīyā 'the sun has risen', rāja tākiyā '(i) have forsaken (my) kingdom' and kāgada le hũ āviyo 'i have brought a paper (i.e., a letter) '. tessitori 1914-1916, §126 gives several examples of this intermediate -i-with roots ending in consonants from Old Mārvārī texts (kar-iu, kah-iu, ūḍ-iu, āp-iu; and the less frequent strong form -ia:u in jaṇ-ia:u and pūj-ia:u).Narottamadāsa Svāmī in his Saṃkṣipta Rājasthānī-vyākaraṇa 1960, 83, introduces the -i-forms as regular alternatives of the sāmānya bhūta: both phiriyo and phiryo in the sg.and phiriyā as well as phiryā in the plural.-i 3 -in perfect participles in the analysed Kabir's pads therefore appears to be due to the influence of western dialects.The same can be said about the sigmatic future joined to the root by the same connecting -i 3 -: apart from Rājasthānī dialects, it appears also in Old Gujarātī and Old Marāṭhī.

B.
Examples of -i 3 -connecting vowel 2 nd pers.sg. of -s 3 -future (< OIA -i-ṣya-): 338.0 kāyā mãjisi kaũna gun 'why will you rub [your] body' 1 st pers.sg. of the -h 2 -future (< OIA -i-ṣya-): 257.3 kahai kabīra mai sala raci marih 'says Kabīr: having built a funeral pyre I shall die' -0 2 -perfective participle (< OIA -i-ta-): 188.2 ākāse phala phaliyā 'in the sky the fruit has ripened' -b 1 -verbal substantive (< OIA -i-tavya-): 315.0 iba mohi nācibau na āvai lit.'now, dancing does not come to me (i.e., I do not feel like dancing)' -b 2 -verbal adjective (< OIA -i-tavya-): 113.0 jau pai rasanā rāma na kahibau, tau upajata binasata bhrãmata rahibau lit.: 'if one will not pronounce the name of Rām (lit.: "if the name of Rām is not to be pronounced ...") with one's tongue, then one has to keep being born, perishing, wandering around' (or: 'one will have to be born, to perish, to wander around again and again') Section V2: -s 3 -future A. Origin and function the origin of the sigmatic suffix used in the formation of the future tense in several NIA languages and dialects can be traced back to the OIA sigmatic future suffix -sya-/-i-ṣya-added to a strengthened verbal root.In the MIA stage (Śaurasenī, Māgadhī), the suffix -ssa-/-issa-is added predominantly to the present stem; the ending of the 1 st pers.sg. is that of the secondary conjugation (-m instead of -mi) (Pischel 1900 GPS, 362, §520).In Apabhraṃśa, this final -m was together with the preceding -a-of the stem transformed into -u: skt.kariṣyāmi > pkt.karissaṃ > apa.karīsu (with the reduction of the double consonant and compensatory lengthening of the preceding vowel).The known Apabhraṃśa terminations coincide with the corresponding forms in Old Mārvāṛī -or Old Western Rājasthānī, as L.P.  -asī; 1. pl. -asy, 2. pl. -asyo, 3. pl. -asī (tessitori 1914-1916, 80-81, §121).similarly Kellogg 1965, 297-8, §502, brings further examples of use and adds that 'in Bundá, Kotah, along the river Chambal, and northward to Jaipúr, the future in स् यू ं , etc., is the usual colloquial form'.In Kabīr's pads, occurrences of this type of future are not numerous; in the three forms of the 2 nd pers.sg., we see the suffix of the future tense connected with the root by the connecting vowel -i 3 -, and in the single instance of the 3 rd pers.sg. the suffix is connected by the vowel -a 3 -.In 138.0 we meet the form cīnhyasi, the affix -ya-being probably a graphic representation of weakened pronunciation of the connecting vowel -i 3 -(cf.McGregor 1968, 114, §2.9).
Since the sigmatic forms in the analysed pads of Kabīr are probably due to some influence of western dialects, still another possibility of their interpretation should be taken into account.tessitori, 1914-1916, §117, mentions as alternative ending of the 2 nd pers.pres.the form -si, although this is, according to him, very rare and limited to certain works written by Jainas, possibly due to the influence of Prākrit used by them.He notes that before this --si, 'thematic a is optionally substituted by i or e' and quotes as examples sah-a-si, anubhav-i-si, kar-e-si, lahe-si, rāc-e-si'.Some forms in the pads of Kabīr could be perhaps be interpreted in this way: e.g., mãjisi in 338.0, for which several other Rājasthānī MSS have athe variant reading mãjasi.Finally, still another possibility is to see in the form mãjisi, and according to M.P. Gupta and V. Sĩha also in cīnhyasi (in the verse 138.0), 2 nd or 3 rd pers.sg. of the Avadhī past tense: for a discussion of this possibility, see, in the present work, the section devoted to inflected perfect.
On the basis of the few examples given below, it is impossible to make a comprehensive statement about the uses of the s-future.the future action is either understood as certain (deṣisi, binasasī) or it is put in an interrogative sentence.Metzger's observation about the use of the s-future in the letters of vakīls of 18 th century Rājasthān may be pertinent to our texts too: 'Allerdings scheint es so zu sein, dass das Futur 1 [i.e., s-future] ausschliesslich zur Bezeichnung von Sachverhalten eingesetzt wird, die definitiv eintreten werden (oder besser, von Sachverhalten von denen das erwartet wird...), während das Futur 2 [i.e., l-future] oft eher eine Möglichkeit oder Wahrscheinlichkeit auszudrücken scheint' (Metzger 2003, 105).4. entry for the corpus (processed by concordancer built in the Wordsmith 2.0.program for linguistic analysis.)
3 -future 2 nd pers.sg.: 138.0 kā nāgaũ kā bdhai cma, jau nah cīnhyasi ātamarma 'what [is the use] of [going around] naked, what [is the use] of binding animal skin (around your body); when you will not recognize God in / as the Self?(or: " ... when you have not recognized the God in the Self?")' 367.2 kah vai loga kah pura paṭãṇa; bahuri na deṣisi āi 'where are those people, where is the quarter, the city [you lived in]?You will not see [them] again having come [back]' 408.3a aba nah bhajisi bhajisi kaba bhāī; āvaigā ãta bhajyau nahĩ jāī 'if you will not worship now, when will you worship?[When] the end comes, it will be impossible to worship' 3 rd pers.sg.: 92.2 je upajyā so binasasī 'what[ever] has been born will perish' 338.0 kāyā mãjisi kaũna gun; je ghaṭa bhītari hai malan 'why (lit.: "for what benefit / profit') will / do you rub [your] body, when the pot is dirty inside?" (or: "... have you rubbed [your] body, ...")