कान्हड़दे प्रबन्ध (कवि पद्मनाभ - जालोर चौहान वीरगाथा, अलाउद्दीन खिलजी से युद्ध व जौहर इतिहास)

30 KĀNHADADE PRABANDHA
Ms B too is old and reliable and has been fully utilized in the
constitution of the text.
Mss E F though fragments and, therefore, undated, appear
from their general condition, script, language etc to be equally old and
reliable. They have been very useful indeed in the collation.
Of the remaining manuscripts D has been more useful than the
rest as it is more faithful to the original, if less erudite than C and J,
which frequently resort to emendations and restorations, and are,
therefore, to that extent untrustworthy. G (H) is pretty old, but is
rather corrupt. L is quite distinct from the rest, being conspicuous by
the peculiarly Rājasthānī character of its script and language. It has
been helpful in tracing and restoring the Rājasthānī elements in the
language of the Prabandha.
VI
The following principles have been adopted in the present
edition for constituting the text.
Instead of reproducing the text of the oldest manuscript
according to the date of its copying, and giving the variants from the
other manuscripts in the footnotes, or basing the text on the evidence
of the majority of manuscripts, I have, as shown above, determined the
geneology of the manuscripts and constituted the text by the selection
of readings which were more representative than the rest. To take
a concrete instance, a reading found in AKB or ABE will be more
representative and therefore more likely to belong to the archetype
than that found in CDJF alone, as the latter, though larger in number,
represent but one family. In the selection of readings due weightage
is also given to older and more reliable manuscripts like AKB or EF.
Having settled the reading for adoption in the text, all the
remaining variants are recorded in the footnote. I have thought it
necessary to give the full critical apparatus for two reasons. It was,
firstly, necessary to preserve the entire ms evidence, where the manu-
scripts were so rare and linguistically so important. Secondly, when a
series of dated mss are available, separated from one another by a quarter
or half a century each, the variants noted from them would enable the
reader to see, at a glance, the phonological development of a word.
In constituting the text I have always kept before me the
linguistic norm found in works composed circa v. s. 1500 and copied
about that time, and have endeavoured to constitute the text in such
a way as to make it approximate to that norm.